Marry Me Review: A Cringe-Inducing Brand Extension for Jennifer Lopez

Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity.

Marry Me
Photo: Universal Pictures

Kat Coiro’s Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity. The film, based on a graphic novel by Bobby Crosby, is as fluffy and haphazard as Jennifer Lopez’s career. It’s a mercenary amalgam of product placements and clumsy attempts at melding Instagram aesthetics with old-fashioned ideas, all wrapped up in the synthetic sentimentality of a Hallmark movie.

Pop superstar Kat Valdez (Lopez) is on the eve of marrying her boyfriend, Bastian, an almost-just-as-famous singer who’s cringe-inducingly played by Maluma. They’re set to marry before an audience of 20 million people, but when the time comes and Kat is being lifted onto the stage, she learns that Bastian is cheating on her with her assistant (Katrina Cunningham). It’s then that Kat abruptly proposes to Charlie (Owen Wilson), a Joe Shmoe math teacher who just happens to be in the audience holding someone else’s sign that reads “Marry Me.”

Kat’s life is the pure embodiment of Southern California glitz. She has a Malibu mansion, an entourage, and a social media team. “Did you see my post?” she says to Bastian from her massage table, as a barrage of assistants bring her jewelry, gowns, and flowers. The absurdity of her environment could have given way to a delightfully camp experience. But the filmmakers aren’t interested in unabashedly playing up the artificiality that links Kat’s world to Lopez’s world. Taking the film closer to the self-aware hyperbolics of Leos Carax’s Annette or Bruno Dumont’s France may have been inevitable had someone like Mariah Carey, whose commitment to drama goes beyond the sartorial, been cast in the lead role.

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Kat’s indecently lavish habits are mostly performed with a dull commitment to matter-of-fact realism. It isn’t until the very end that she’s even allowed to embody the ridiculousness of her lifestyle through exaggeration. For instance, when she boards a plane to Peoria, Illinois, in a spur-of-the-moment decision to see Charlie at a math contest, she tries to buy champagne for everyone on the plane only to find out that they don’t serve bubbles in coach.

“It’s just publicity, it’s not real.” That’s what Charlie says at one point about the relationship that he and Kat end up having. By then, it’s impossible not to hear it as a direct reference to Marry Me, whose idea of the kind of power a star can wield belongs to a previous century, along with the ideology that it hawks. It’s one where traditional marriage is the highest form of bliss, more valuable than endless wealth or universal fame, and where infidelity is a no-questions-asked deal-breaker. That’s a mighty conservative backbone, which the film attempts to prick with the occasional feminist gesture, as when Kat questions in a press conference why we expect the man to always propose to the woman. But these fall embarrassingly flat, as they’re in direct contradiction with what the narrative deems precious all along.

Score: 
 Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Sarah Silverman, John Bradley, Maluma, Chloe Coleman  Director: Kat Coiro  Screenwriter: Harper Dill, John Rogers, Tami Sagher  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: 2022  Year: PG-13  Buy: Video

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

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