John Early is a tightrope artist. There’s little about his debut feature, Maddie’s Secret, that should work. With the DNA of a comedy sketch, Maddie’s Secret is a drag performance, an ’80s after-school special, a Sirkian melodrama, a cutting satire of millennial America… all centered around a woman with an eating disorder. The movie is searingly funny and disarmingly earnest; it weaves so nimbly through camp and sincerity, the high and the low, that it’s nearly impossible to define (Is Maddie a bit? Am I laughing at her or with her?). Somehow, Early nails every mark in his impossibly wide purview, crafting one of the more beautiful movies of the year.
Maddie (John Early) is a good girl, so much so that everyone in her charmed life either bemoans or marvels at her perfection. We meet her on a morning run as she jogs through Los Feliz, collecting inspiration for a new vegetarian recipe — a hip burger joint here, a sign with an eggplant emoji there. Maddie is a dishwasher for Gourmaybe, a food content farm within a jumbled knot of a media conglomerate, but she holds dreams of cooking in front of the camera. Egged on by her doting meatball of a horny husband (Eric Rahill), Maddie works up the nerve to post a video of her new dish. It turns out, she was onto something: the video goes viral, and her lecherous boss (Conner O’Malley) promotes her to the center stage.
But fame comes with a heavy crown. “You know what they say, the camera adds 10 pounds,” Maddie’s mother (Kristen Johnston) chokes out between vape hits. Maddie has wrestled with bulimia since childhood, and the mounting pressures of viral stardom have triggered a relapse. When her husband finds her puking in their bathroom, she panics with a lie: “I’m pregnant.” It’s a secret that will be her undoing.
Eating disorders are thorny territory for comedies, but Maddie’s Secret is so lovingly rendered that it avoids cresting cruelty without sacrificing a laugh. Credit that to Early’s performance: his command of his body and tone keeps Maddie safe from the pitfalls of drag’s cinematic lineage, and he sells the character so convincingly that the idea of it being a drag act in the first place fades quickly — even against a Brechtian level of artifice. Disordered eating is never a punchline in its own right; instead, Maddie’s Secret’s comedy comes via a cast of some of the most talented working comedians today.
Early’s longtime comedy partner Kate Berlant delivers the film’s best punchlines as Deena, Maddie’s barbed-wire tattooed coworker who can’t quite hide her unwieldy crush on the rising food star. Conner O’Malley brings his trademarked aggro-insanity as he dangles over the wrong side of a #MeToo moment; Claudia O’Doherty turns against type as Maddie’s mean-girl nemesis; Eric Rahill is as sweet and silly as he is sweaty. The cast is a comedy nerd’s dream, but Maddie’s Secret knows better than to indulge in easter eggs and in-jokes, preferring a meticulous vocal fry instead as Maddie declares herself a queer ally. The jokes are strong and considered, even when it’s time to let the darkness in.
When Maddie lands an opportunity to work as a food consultant on a major network drama (“The Boar,” a gig created through Disney by way of FX by way of Condé Nast), her disorder reaches a fever pitch. An intense workout puts Maddie into cardiac arrest and subsequently a rehab center, where she meets a new cadre of allies (Vanessa Bayer) and enemies (Ruby McCollister, Emily Allan). It’s here that Early’s tonal precision shifts from impressive to masterful. For all its weighty themes, Maddie’s Secret never feels dour, nor does it dance with cheap provocation. Maddie may have started as a bit, but Early is as invested in her well-being and catharsis as he is in her punchlines.
Maddie’s Secret’s namesake is borrowed from the 1986 made-for-TV movie Kate’s Secret, a bulimia morality play so thematically vulgar it threatens parody by its own volition. Early would have been safe to adhere to his source’s clumsy aesthetics, but his collaboration with cinematographer Max Lanker offers another revelation. Maddie’s Secret trades in the lush, glossy frames of classic Western melodramas, following a tradition sparked by Douglas Sirk, hardened by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and kept alive by Todd Haynes. It’s difficult to think of a contemporary comedy that cares so much about light and color, the way in which a pocket of steam rising from a soufflé can trap a midmorning sunbeam. Attention to beauty is another notch in Maddie’s Secret’s commitment to artifice — and its eventual insistence that the borders between the genuine and the constructed may not be all that important.
Like so many other staples of American life, Trump’s election ruptured a schism in modern comedy. An ascendant right pivoted toward a brick-wall revival and political sycophancy; a vocal left embraced identity-driven, empathy-forward storytelling. With one faction increasingly vile and another circling inertia, it can be difficult to drum up much enthusiasm for the form. But objects like Maddie’s Secret offer a shot in the arm. That Early’s film offers a reprieve from an increasingly stuffy ecosystem is likely more by-product than intention, but the effect is welcome nonetheless. Under his command, comedy is proven alive, vital, beautiful.
DIRECTOR: John Early; CAST: John Early, Kate Berlant, Eric Rahill, Kristen Johnston, Claudia O’Doherty; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: June 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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