Review: John Early cooks up a marvelous melodrama with “Maddie’s Secret”

by Cláudio Alves 

Women on screen are more interesting than men. This is a truth universally acknowledged by actressexuals everywhere, and, by the looks of it, John Early is an actressexual like no other. For his feature directorial debut, the openly queer comedian-turned-actor-turned-maverick-filmmaker has decided to take these passions to the next level. Rather than watch from afar, he has become one of the great actresses he’d like to see on screen. And yet, for all it plays with gender, Maddie’s Secret isn’t necessarily a trans narrative nor what one usually expects from a drag queen movie, especially one whose cast comprises so many sketch and stand-up comedians. The film’s genealogy harkens back to Old Hollywood melodrama and its queer revisionisms and reinventions by the hands of auteurs such as John Waters and Todd Haynes. Run a DNA test, and you’ll find some of Polyester in there, some Superstar, but also those moralistic “based on a true story” spectacles that filled the small screen during the TV movie heyday. 

Arriving in cinemas this week, through Magnolia Pictures, Early’s passion project is an essential Pride Month watch…

Maddie’s Secret starts in comical idyll. We meet our leading lady, vegetarian gourmand Maddie Ralph, as she’s going about her morning run through the streets of LA. The Californian sun reaches us in overexposed fashion, the world glowing in a haze of pastels while a peppy, instrumental cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” sparkles across the soundtrack. It’s one hell of an opening, already suggesting the strange tonal place where Early has situated his movie. While the credits roll and Maddie runs, blonde tresses flying behind her dewy visage, the sequence touches on eggplant-related sight gags as easily as it pauses to smell roadside flowers and indulge in a Sirkian lushness that wouldn’t be out of place in something like Written on the Wind.

It’s both intoxicating and odd, reaching for a tone that’s hard to pin down and even harder to put into words. And that’s before Maddie arrives at her workplace, a test kitchen cum social media content mill, where she washes dishes and watches others live her dream in front of the cameras. And speaking of cameras, they are everywhere, both within and without the studio. People walk around with their phones attached like extensions of themselves, making themselves 24/7 camera operators in search of a good subject to commodify through their digital gaze. Maybe that’s why Early and DP Max Lakner shoot so much of these passages in smooth circular motions, restless, eschewing a disciplined mise-en-scène in lieu of thematic resonance.

Indeed, back at home, cooking up a meal under impossible moonlight, Maddie is filmed by her hubbie, who sees the potential to turn his spouse into an online sensation. She just wanted to make her husband dinner, and suddenly she’s in post-production. Overnight, the lowly dishwasher becomes a star, promoted to on-camera talent while rising in popularity above her workplace nemesis. Everything is going so well for Maddie that it’s hard to accept how all this joy is teetering on a knife’s edge. For as success mounts, so rises the stress of a woman’s expectations of herself, and with it comes the ghost of an eating disorder. Maddie is bulimic, and though she believed such horrors had been left behind in her past, that isn’t so.

The love and adoration, from close friends and partners, coworkers and even strangers, can be too little, too late. Insufficient, not enough, even overwhelming. Not that Early is judging his protagonist. Nor is he making her into the subject of mockery. His casting in the lead isn’t ever presented as a joke in itself, not even when Maddie’s Secret gives in to surprising sensualism, both in the gaze of a loving husband and the leering curiosity of a lesbian co-worker. Somehow, Early has found a way to strike a chord of camp earnestness while respectfully addressing eating disorders.  Thus, Maddie being played by a seemingly cis male actor in drag becomes less of a gimmick and more of a character detail that barrels right through gender conventions. 

It’s an added wrinkle in a narrative that increasingly centers on how a woman perceives herself and, in turn, obsesses over how others perceive her and how to attain control. Early’s commitment to the bit helps a great deal, for there’s naught a hint of irony in the characterization. He is earnestly resurrecting the old-fashioned women’s picture and treating this would-be foodfluencer’s plight with the pathos it deserves, risking accusations of stylistic pastiche while avoiding the limitations such labels imply. His Maddie has to be one of the cinematic year’s most singular creations, strikingly uncomplicated in her humanity yet impossible to categorize as so many performance and visual traditions seem to intersect within her person. 

Another important factor is just how the director chooses to dramatize all this. Maddie’s Secret is trying to strike a delicate balance, especially when depicting binge eating and the subsequent purges. There’s space for leaning into the grotesquerie as a visualization of the leading lady’s subjective headspace, how these indulgences come hand in hand with shame and self-reflective disgust. At the same time, the text is keen to counter these notions with a positive outlook on food as a language of love, a source of pleasure and entertainment, and an essential part of our lives. The Whale, Maddie’s Secret is not and we’re all better for it. For sure, though blessed with far fewer resources, Early’s formal solutions outclass late Aronofsky in these direct comparisons.

For example, there’s real, appreciable technique in how a queer gym can go from a place of radical acceptance and joy to a storm of projected insecurities. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as letting the windows bloom with too much light and allowing the swirling camera to go lower, into positions that emphasize a body’s volume and weight rather than the drama of a pose, the ebullience of dance. And it all culminates in a crisis that’s genuinely upsetting. The layers of stylization inherent to this movie could provoke audience alienation and dismissals of it all as pure frivolity. However, it’s hard to imagine anyone not being involved or engaged by Maddie’s journey, not rooting for her salvation, whatever shape it may take. 

No joke, this might be some of the smartest material on the topic of eating disorders narrative American cinema has produced in a while. It understands the scrutiny which comes with adoration, and how a benign compliment can feel like a confirmation of deep insecurities, a kiss with a fist. Early also gets that, while he might be drawing on the visual languages of yore, disorders such as these are shaped by our time and place. How does one so ailed survive in a world that feels obsessed with looking and being looked at across a multiverse of platforms and seemingly infinite screens? No wonder that, as Maddie is consumed by paranoia, the visual language becomes less roving and fluid, more insinuating in composition, the tensions comprehended within the frame sharpened, knife-like.

Maddie’s Secret makes one want to crack open Early’s skull and peer into his brains. Maybe then we would be able to grasp the full scope of references, quotations, and cultural echoes resonating through this tale. Maddie’s mother reflected on her flat screen TV is straight out of Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows, presaging later conclusions about self-hatred passed from mother to daughter, a religion of discipline promoted by a diet culture on those damned screens. Yet other echoes are harder to recognize. And that’s when they’re not gesturing towards whole subgenres like asylum pictures or women’s prison stories. Then again, the gist of it comes through and you needn’t an encyclopedic knowledge of Early’s reference points to get “it.”

Lastly, it’s important to denote that the irreverence of its central casting, the tonal gambit manifesting through the remaining ensemble and elements like a score that’s both a parody and a sincere homage, is enough to reframe the didacticism of certain scenes and make Maddie’s Secret feel oh-so-distant from its most mainstream, reactionary, even conservative media predecessors. In the end, from this mélange arises a movie of surprising depth and most moving impact. For sure, by the time the credits roll on a final plea for hope, I’d wager you’ll be as in love with Maddie Ralph as I was. Just as the people in her orbit, and as the camera that traces her mundane, but never unremarkable, journey through hell and back.

Maddie’s Secret is currently in theaters. Even if you’re not already a fan of John Early, this might make you one. Don’t miss it!