Review: Maddie's Secret — Crooked Marquee

Growing up watching Lifetime movies in health class about eating disorders, there was something about films like Kate’s Secret and For the Love of Nancy that inspired giggles as you sat at a desk in the dark watching a video on a wheeled-in TV. Was it the over-the-top acting delivered by actresses like Meredith Baxter? The melodrama with ridiculous lines that no real person could say with a straight face? The soft lighting that made everyone look just a little better even when they were going through it?

But even though it was hard to take these movies seriously, there was still something that managed to cut through the silliness, sparking sadness about the heroine’s struggles with food and her body. With his directorial debut, comedian John Early somehow captures both of these feelings, though his comedy is all intentional. Maddie’s Secret is a perfectly pitched satire that targets both the Lifetime films of the ‘80s and ‘90s and contemporary influencer culture while simultaneously being an effective exercise in empathy for its heroine, who Early dons a wig and dresses to play. With all of these elements, Maddie’s Secret should be ridiculous, but there’s something real at its heart that makes it strangely moving.

Maddie (Early) works at cooking content company Gourmaybe as a dishwasher alongside her best friend Deena (regular Early collaborator Kate Berlant), but she sees food as storytelling and wants something more. When her husband (Eric Rahill) takes a video of her cooking at home and it surprisingly goes viral, Maddie is given the opportunity she’s always wanted and becomes on-screen talent at Gourmaybe, much to the annoyance of bitchy star Emily (Claudia O’Doherty). But being in front of the camera also invites comments on her body both online and in real life, and she reverts back to her long-dormant struggles with bulimia, threatening both her new career and her health.

For how absurdly funny it is, Maddie’s Secret always treats Maddie’s secret with real sensitivity. It makes fun of a wide variety of subjects—Los Angeles, food culture, orange wine, influencers, jugglers—but Early’s script and direction treats her eating disorder with utter seriousness. In both how Early shoots and plays Maddie, he handles her character with real tenderness and affection. In other hands, she would be a joke, especially since she’s played by a male comedian dressed in drag.

Yet Early is oddly, wonderfully sincere in his performance; there isn’t a single wink at the audience in his approach to playing the sweet, soft character of Maddie. There aren’t any cheap jokes at her expense. He puts equal effort into the visuals too; the aforementioned requisite soft lighting is present, but colors are vibrant and he puts more thought into how Maddie’s Secret looks than most TV movies of the 20th century and comedies of the 21st.

This isn’t A Deadly Adoption, the Will Ferrell-Kristin Wiig goof that took aim at Lifetime fare and somehow also aired on the network it was lampooning. Maddie’s Secret works as a satire, but it could also be watched just as seriously as the Lifetime movies were intended to be watched before they became a cultural joke. This comedy leans into the tropes of the genre, down to its sentimental piano score and overly serious delivery of lines like “She wasn’t supposed to exercise!” Unsurprisingly, there’s as much John Waters DNA present as there is Douglas Sirk, but it’s also all Early. I don’t know who else could have made this movie with its deft juggling of tones and topics. Maddie’s Secret is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, while wearing its influences so boldly.