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 behaviour 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 literally no longer the bigger person, she should be 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment