A woman decides to quit running in place
Brittany Runs a Marathon Rated: R for language throughout, sexuality and some drug material. Running time: 104 minutes. 666 out of4
“Brittany Runs a Marathon,” a basedonreallife tale of an obese woman’s challenging journey to take control of her life by getting into enough shape to run the New York City Marathon, is inspiring and wellwritten and contains an appealingly curmudgeonly central performance by comedian Jillian Bell.
It also has a big elephant in the room, and no, that’s not a fat joke. But more on that later.
The film begins with Brittany, at 28, standing 5 feet 6 and weighing 197 pounds. She is the fat sidekick to some beautiful young women, which includes her roommate and drinking buddy Gretchen (Alice Lee), a woman whose every posting on social media “gets 10,000 likes,” Brittany grouses. The only weapon Brittany has in her arsenal is her sharp, biting sense of sarcastic humor, which she employs mainly to surround herself in emotional armor.
Her selfesteem is near zero, and she can lash out and be cruelly cutting to others as a defense mechanism.
Brittany has a penchant for adding drugs to her alcohol, and she visits a doctor with the objective of getting a prescription for Adderall. The doctor won’t play along and instead checks off a laundry list of health issues, including high cholesterol and blood pressure, unusual in someone who is only 28. His advice: Eat healthier, exercise, and drop 55 pounds.
“That’s the size of a Siberian husky,” Brittany says, shellshocked. “You want me to pull a mediumsized working dog off of my body?”
She resists at first — this is a tall mountain to climb. But eventually she realizes that she wants to not only look better, but also like herself more. Because it’s not just the extra weight but also her emotional insecurities that need changing. Inspired partly by a neighbor she hates, Catherine (Michaela Watkins), she takes up jogging, beginning with a painful trip to the end of the block.
The results come slowly, but as part of her makeover, she begins hanging out less with Gretchen and their crew and hangs out mainly with Catherine and another member of her Saturday jogging group,
Seth (Micah Stock). She takes an extra job dogsitting and practically moves into the absent dog owner’s house, where she meets another squatter, Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar).
The hard work begins to pay off. After a few months, she has dropped 40 pounds and feels a lot better. Through Jern, she rediscovers the joys of sex.
But her emotional rehabilitation comes much more slowly. Her inferiority complex proves hard to overcome, and she continues to heap insults on Catherine, even as she gets to know her better and finds that her life is not perfect — Catherine is going through a painful divorce. Brittany also backslides and gains some weight back.
It’s here that that elephant in the room comes in. One of the things that Brittany has to overcome is her binge drinking. The word “alcoholic” is not mentioned in the movie, but let’s face it: Brittany is a raging alcoholic. She could use professional help, both
for substance abuse and for her emotional wellbeing.
But that’s not an avenue pursued by writerdirector Paul Downs Colaizzo, who was roommates with the reallife Brittany. In the second half of the film, she has an embarrassing meltdown at her brotherinlaw’s birthday party, one of those uncomfortable and ridiculous drunk scenes where the alcoholic brutally insults everyone around her (an old movie trope that few directors have successfully pulled off ).
Otherwise, Calaizzo’s script is sharp, funny and honest, and nicely avoids movie cliches about obesity. Bell’s performance is very good, both physically — the actress herself lost 40 pounds for the role — and emotionally.
It’s not giving anything away to say that the film climaxes at the New York City Marathon. After all that running in place, Brittany is finally going somewhere in her life.