A legit reason to rake Rebel Wilson over the coals

The first time I saw Rebel Wilson, it was in Bridesmaids. My impression of her was: "Who is this asshole who thinks it's cool to call everything stupid, and to be vulgar and inappropriate, often in a confrontational sexual manner, in any and every situation?"

It felt to me extremely immature, but also Wilson was only 31 then. Her mind had only finished developing six years earlier. Perhaps a little immaturity could be forgiven. 

Certainly there are other comic actors who profile this way, so I've tried to keep my Rebel Wilson opinions -- which have not significantly changed in the 15 years since then -- to myself. Complicating the matter, and softening my impression of her to some degree, was that Wilson was an oversized performer, which was part of her shtick and which excused, at least a bit, her sort of desperate need to be looked at and to be considered shocking. 

But especially now that she's lost weight, such that you might never have known she was overweight if you were first encountering her today, I'm finding what remains of her shtick to just be irritating. And now I have good reason to believe that she may not just be playing an asshole on TV -- she may actually be one.

My latest review on ReelGood, posted just today, is of Wilson's directorial debut, The Deb. I was cautiously optimistic about the movie, because I feel like I might have been on a bit of a personal Wilson upswing, having really liked her 2022 film Senior Year. I noticed that The Deb actually debuted at TIFF as long ago as 2024, but I didn't think much of it. "Distribution can be weird," I thought.

I started out liking the movie well enough -- it's a musical, if I didn't say that -- but as it went along, it dropped from a possible 3.5 stars, down to clearly no better than 3, down to where I landed on it in my review: 2.5 stars.

Last night I still had to chew over the remainder of the review I'd started the day before, and happened to mention the movie to my wife. She said "Oh is that the one with all the legal troubles?"

Indeed it is, and I'm glad I learned this before finalizing what I planned to write.

I'm not going to go into all the different blows that have been traded over this movie, though the Wikipedia page does so, if you're interested in reading up on it. Suffice it to say that what appears to have begun as a dispute over a writing credit morphed into defamatory comments about the producers and even the star of the movie. Much time was spent in court, and in the meantime, the film was in limbo.

Things like this are always "he said/she said" -- or in this case, it appears to be "she said/she said" -- but given what I already know, or at least feel I know, about Wilson as a person, I'm inclined to find her culpable for much of it. As a typical example of the spraygun nature of her attention-grabbing sense of vulgarity, she seems to accuse the producers of abominable behavior toward the star (Charlotte MacInnes), but then also reserves separate contempt for MacInnes herself. It's a very Rebel Wilson thing, it seems to me, to be defending a person and attacking them at the same time.

But the thing that seems really strange, especially since she's just made a movie in which mean girls are supposed to learn not to bully, is that Wilson really comes off as a bully herself here. Who knows what actually transpired between her and MacInnes, but what is indisputable is what she wrote on social media about her 26-year-old star, a relative newcomer with obviously a lot less industry power than Wilson. According to Wikipedia, which is never wrong (ha ha), here's what Wilson wrote:

Wilson captioned a video of the performance "Charlotte MacInnes in a culturally inappropriate Indian outfit on Len Blavatnik's luxury yacht in Cannes — ironically singing a song from a movie that will never get released because of her lies and support for the people blocking the film's release."

Oh, and she used the movie's own Instagram account to post this.

A 46-year-old, 20 years the senior of her star, can no longer get off the hook for shit like this on the grounds of "immaturity." Even if she's no longer literally the bigger person, she should be the bigger person metaphorically. 

It may be unfair for me to call out Wilson when I obviously haven't done my due diligence by reading up on all the history. Honestly, that's not worth my time.

But the truth is, I feel like I am a pretty good judge of character, and I feel like I determined, as long ago as 2011, that Wilson doesn't have much of it. Any conflict like the one that plagued The Deb has its nuances, and I'm sure all involved parties were probably dicks at some point. But Wilson has made a career out of being a dick, having no nuance at all in her public persona. Sometimes, when a person appears to be a dick, they just are. 

Not talking about Rebel Wilson's new body in my Senior Year review

It's appropriate that the new Netflix comedy Senior Year is about a woman who awakens from a 20-year coma to find a world of very different technologies and social morays. In 2002, when the woman (played by Rebel Wilson) had her cheerleading mishap that led to a coma, it was a totally acceptable -- nay, rewarded -- pursuit to vie for the frequently interrelated titles of cheerleading captain and prom queen. Today, most teenagers desire to become neither, recognizing the shortcomings of both aspirations while being insufferably shallow anyway in their own modern, social media-influenced ways.

It's appropriate because in 2002, a critic -- possibly even me as a critic, because I was one then -- would have written about Wilson's significant weight loss in my review. It wouldn't have seemed possible not to write about it, simply because you have to acknowledge the elephant in the room -- and no, that's not a fat joke.

Today, not so much.

Oh, I thought about it. It seems like a legitimate talking point about the movie. I don't know how much weight Wilson has lost, but enough to make her a candidate to play the role she's playing, when she never would have been one in the past. Googling to find out how much weight she lost is on the wrong side of the line that I'm looking at today, and besides, it may be even more now than it was at the time of filming.

But I knew there was no way to talk about it without it becoming inadvertent body shaming at best, a prurient fixation on the physical attractiveness of actresses at worst. That's the era we live in today, and though a person usually would accompany such words with a critical shake of the head, it is undoubtedly a good thing that we can't get away with this sort of thing anymore. So instead of in my review, I just talk about it on my blog, right?

I do think it's a newsworthy consideration. Actors make their name with one particular sort of appearance, and if they're making a name at all, it means that appearance works for them. Chris Farley wouldn't have been Chris Farley at half the weight, and whether or not she aspired to this, Wilson was sort of in the same boat. Her larger than life personality went with a body that was larger than your typical Hollywood body, and there was never any doubt that there was a physical aspect to what made her funny. Fortunately in Wilson's case we were laughing with her, not at her.

But life in the spotlight is hard, and people on the internet are cruel. Who knows how many times Wilson had to read that she was fat, or pretend to deflect comments from casting directors about what roles she was suited to play, as if they didn't cut her deeply. So she did lose the weight, and though we still remember the way her personality was sort of an accompaniment to the size she was when we first met her, she's pulling it off. 

I think it's newsworthy because a change in the sort of roles a person can play is a not-irrelevant form of engaging with their body of work, which we do in a review. And most critics will know that it can be useful to have a real-world opening paragraph to a film review, to orient the viewer before delving into specifics about the film in question. The temptation was there to at least mention in passing her weight loss.

Instead I talked about the roles Wilson was suited to play in a different context -- those based on a personality so specific and so heavy on shtick that they undermined her candidacy for a lot of realistic roles in realistic films. Fortunately, that doesn't really describe Senior Year, which doesn't mean it's not effective -- which it is, as you'll see if you read my review. 

It's something a woke critic should learn to do if he or she doesn't already. While changes in physical appearance -- which also include things like plastic surgery -- do feel relevant to the assessment of an artistic work, especially if a new artificiality prevents you from relating to the character as a real human being, you're so much better off just letting it go. It's more fair to the performer and you'll feel better about yourself in the morning.

But it does require shutting off those instincts. Especially if we don't know what to write about a movie -- which was not a problem for me with Senior Year -- we tend to lean toward surface-level observations that don't necessarily improve the review, but at least maybe get you going in your writing. We're better off if we resist this though. For example, in 2022, no one wants to hear a critic -- particularly a white male critic -- incorporating the physical attractiveness of an actress into the text of a review, in the same way that people don't need to hear about race from that critic just because a film happens to feature minority characters. 

And so it is with plastic surgery, and especially with weight loss. It may be an interesting thing to observe in your own mind, and you may feel like mentioning it is a way of congratulating the person on something that must have been very hard.

But it probably doesn't have a place in a review. 

If you must acknowledge that elephant in the room, at least save it for your blog.