Nicola Peltz Beckham, a billionaire’s daughter, made a movie about abject poverty. It’s as bad as you think
If a nepo baby makes a laughably oblique film portraying what she must imagine to be the strife of the impoverished class, but hardly anyone watches it, will it hurt her career?
That’s sort of a trick question. Nicola Peltz Beckham, daughter of the Disney agitator investor and billionaire Nelson Peltz, and daughter-in-law of the power couple David and Victoria Beckham, dwells in a tax stratum so high that her career’s successes and failures are almost irrelevant. Most learned her name when her father filed a lawsuit against two of her former wedding planners over a $159,000 deposit – a relatively small amount in comparison with the reported $3.8m bill for her nuptials to Brooklyn Beckham. She has acted in a handful of television shows and movies since she was 11, but Lola, which premiered on 9 February with a limited theatrical and digital release, marks her writing and directorial debut, and her first leading role. Peltz Beckham described the project, which she’s been working on for six years, as a “slice-of-life film”.
On the whole, Lola is a bad movie. Peltz Beckham plays Lola James, a 19-year-old who splits her time working at a drugstore with her best friend, Babina, and a strip club, where she’s naive though intrigued by what goes down in the back room. Her tense home life in “middle America” is dominated by her alcoholic mother, Mona (Virginia Madsen), who cruelly ridicules her younger, genderqueer sibling Arlo (the child is referred to with he/him pronouns in the movie), whose affinity for painted nails and makeup is at odds with Mona’s God-fearing Christian values. Lola aspires to send Arlo to art camp in Dallas, which vaguely motivates her to make more money, including servicing creepy customers in the strip club’s back room. After taking refuge at Babina’s house to escape Mona’s wrath, Lola stops back home to pick up the pet bulldog, only to be raped by Mona’s boyfriend, Trick. A few days later, Mona makes Arlo cut his long blond hair, causing him to run away through the streets. He is hit by a car and killed. This perhaps causes Lola to start abusing nose drugs that she buys from Malachi, a pockmarked ex-boyfriend with fluffy hair eager to win her back after cheating on her.
I write “vaguely” and “perhaps” because the plot points hardly feel inciting or interconnected, but rather like trauma bulbs spaced out neatly on a string of lights. Unwilling sex work, scraping by at minimum wage, being abused, losing a sibling violently, abusing drugs – all the bulbs are turned on at once, blinding the moviegoer.
Also, Lola gets pregnant from the rape.
The movie ends with Mona blaming Lola for Arlo’s death, and Lola keeping the baby Trick impregnated her with and raising it with Malachi. In the interim she gets sober through a Narcotics Anonymous group (Peltz Beckham’s brother Will Peltz plays a fellow member, who seemingly flirts with her after a meeting?), confronts her terrible mother, and declares in a concluding narration that this has been a story about generational trauma.
Lola doesn’t even deserve the hatewatch indulgence that Madame Web received. Filled to the brim with underbaked, oftentimes harmful tropes – the supportive Black best friend, a queer child meeting an unceremonious death, the virginal stripper saved by motherhood, a hypocritical Christian drunk – the film leaves one wondering what could have been achieved if any of these characters or their storylines were given as much attention as the gaffers paid to the light hitting Peltz Beckham’s cheekbones.
But, save for a handful of Letterboxd and Google reviews and a WWD interview, very few people have called out Peltz Beckham’s egregious leverage of the aesthetics of poverty, as well as sex work and queer suffering, to serve her creative reputation. The majority of the press surrounding Lola handles the 29-year-old with kid gloves. “You should be so proud of yourself,” an interviewer at the Hollywood Reporter offered. Kelly Clarkson softballed her questions about how fun it must have been to bring her mom and husband on set. Vogue’s coverage of the Lola premiere glossed over the contents of the film and celebrated instead what Peltz Beckham wore (Victoria Beckham’s designs) and how the after-party was decorated (like a strip club).
Peltz Beckham did achieve something with Lola: it’s called “poverty porn”, and in film, that means the exploitation of the conditions of poverty for entertainment and artistic recognition.
Whether a project can be described as “poverty porn” depends on where it falls along the exploration to exploitation spectrum: media that explores