Movies

Luckyest Girl Alive review – Mila Kunis runs out of luck in Netflix flat drama | Mila Kunis

October 7, 2022

Jhe book cover for Luckyest Girl Alive, Jessica Knoll’s 2015 bestselling debut novel about the seemingly perfect life of a woman corroded by past trauma, features a large, vibrant font on a cheap-looking black rose – a symbol of rebirth made tacky, a bit emo. It’s time for a mid-2010s literary hit, but also seems to anticipate the 2022 Netflix adaptation, which twists the novel from its caustic wit and jagged observations of New York careerists into a hollow, undeserved anthem of empowerment. .

The film version, directed by Mike Barker from a screenplay by Knoll, suffers from a similar problem to this summer’s Where the Crawdads Sing, another adaptation of a literary hit about a jagged female protagonist exploited by Reese Witherspoon. (Witherspoon, a Crawdads producer, originally bought the rights to Knoll’s novel but dropped the project.) Both films inherit and reify the flaws of its source material. Many movie problems are book problems, compounded, in the case of Luckyest Girl Alive, by decisions to tone down the novel’s more uncomfortable psychology and piggyback the ending on the #MeToo movement.

Knoll’s novel drew comparisons upon its release to Gillian Flynn, author of the 2012 novel Gone Girl and screenwriter of David Fincher’s superlative 2014 film adaptation. Luckiest Girl Alive works in a similar way to Gone Girl or even Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman: These are extreme distillations of the vast chasm between outer tranquility and inner bile of a (white, conventionally beautiful) woman, with flashbacks suggesting a wild twist.

Luckyest Girl Alive delivers some of that legacy in its first half: Ani FaNelli, played as a 30-something by Mila Kunis, is fierce. She seems wise, charmed, wealthy – a Cartier jewelry-wearing sex advice editor at a women’s magazine, best friend to the beautiful Nell (Justine Lupe of Succession) and engaged to Luke (Finn Wittrock, born to play a bottom baby fiduciary). His inner voice, provided by an acid monologue, is a molten judgement. A “hard-core former financial helper,” she obsessed over the appearance of wealth, ravaging her perception (“petite,” as one salesman calls her, is “for little fat girls”). She prides herself on avoiding carbs, then stuffs her face with pizza when Luke isn’t looking. The film is strongest for capturing the fragile frenzy of 2015 in New York City – crowded subways, peacock office attire, Ani’s eye still on a more prestigious status symbol, a better performance.

The cracks appear early on – shopping with Luke for wedding registry knives, Ani imagines them dripping with blood – and widen when a documentarian approaches her to tell her side of a story. tragic. The film highlights the fact that Ani survived and was partially blamed for a 1999 school shooting that killed several classmates and crippled Dean Barton (Alex Barone), who became a politician. It would be traumatic enough, but the real story, her reason for reinventing herself and her loss, is revealed in flashbacks to her time as TiffAni, a sophomore in financial aid at a swanky private academy.

Young TiffAni (Chiara Aurelia) is an ordinary teenager: interested in English, embarrassed by her clumsy middle-class mother (Connie Britton), ready to party. Barker cleverly captures the night that split Ani’s life in two – a gruesome sexual assault – in the vein of memories blinded by alcohol and trauma. Chaotic, fragmentary, destabilizing. Aurelia is impressive as a teenager reeling from shame and pressure from her English teacher (Scoot McNairy) and bullied friends Arthur (Thomas Barbusca) and Ben (David Webster).

It’s a shame, then, that everything after this reveal is so heavy. There’s no twist, as the film’s echoes of a thriller suggest. Kunis does her best to cling to Ani’s fragile pain beneath the icy shell, but her sure-footed performance drowns in clichés. The film is not just about what could be (as it was best described in the novel) the portrait of a woman learning to speak her truth, but about the story of a perfect victim: someone who has survived an infamous tragedy, the pain of which has been totally misunderstood and discredited, who builds a perfect life only for the dark secret to unravel it, then rise stronger. There are tracks from Luckyest Girl Alive that seem to be concerned with a life shattered by trauma, the relief of unloading, the thirst for certainty about what happened, the thrill of playing on the cultural expectations of women. But the story he ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.