In Defence of Trash
If you’re going to go there, go there and bring us some campy sleaze.
Verity
Director: Michael Showalter • Writer: Nick Antosca, based on the book by Colleen Hoover
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett
USA • 1hr 57mins
Opens Hong Kong October 1 • III
Grade: C-
One of the more hilarious things about the Verity is the fact that its whole story is predicated on a published, yet not terribly successful, young author, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) taking a job with publisher Hachette ghostwriting for one of their superstars, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). She’s medically indisposed and they need to get her next book out anyway because ka-ching. It’s funny because Verity is produced by Amazon, which had a huge contract fight with Hachette Group a decade ago (they think we forgot) over how best to 1) fuck their authors, 2) fuck their consumers and 3) fatten their stock prices. Guess there’s peace in the house now because Hachette may as well be in the cast list it’s name-checked so often.
But that’s more ironic than funny, and in matter of fact Verity is not (intentionally) funny. Nor is it sexy, saucy, campy or unhinged enough to stand alongside the best bananas erotic thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s. It wants to, and there are flashes when it comes close to the bonkers magic of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, or Wild Things, or Color of Night – the same way last year’s surprisingly entertaining The Housemaid almost did too. Verity’s already been called 50 Shades of the Devil Wears Prada among other elevator pitches, but it’s much more of a variation on monster-selling author Colleen Hoover’s favourite themes. This feels like It Ends With Us – with a generously tressed, lean, pretty-but-anonymous white girl caught between two hunky, 5 o’clock shadowed white dudes, but gender swapped – with a bit of Regretting You (more like “Forgetting You” because I forgot this existed) and Reminders of Him. Hoover is the 2020s Nicholas Sparks in all its soft focus, new-age, pop psychology romanticism.
Speaking of agents…
Director Michael Showalter is an odd choice for Verity, considering he’s a minor comedy titan, best known for Wet Hot American Summer, The Big Sick and last year’s anti-Christmas movie Oh. What. Fun. Were some of his snark on display Verity may have been able to rise above its Hooverism but alas, it’s played fairly straight. And sterile. After the wackiest cold open and “One year later” jump in the history of cinema and some monotone voice over, Lowen meets hunky, 5 o’clock shadowed white dude Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) at the scene of a gory Manhattan traffic accident; the most fucked up meet cute ever. A few minutes later they meet again along with her literary agent Corey (Ismael Cruz Cordova) and some heavy-hitters at Hachette. After signing an NDA, Lowen learns she’s in the running to ghost write for Verity Crawford (I swear to god these names), who owes Hachette a new novel in a series of bestsellers in about 24 months. Hoover speed. Of course she gets the gig, and promptly moves into the Crawfords’ sprawling Vermont cabin in the woods (for research and sexy times), which is all reclaimed timber, natural rock, and both oat and almond milk in the fridge. Also in the house is Verity, in a creepy vegetative state – a sort of phantom Mrs Rochester, or better still the First Mrs de Winter (for the record Hoover is no Du Maurier). Capping off the ludicrous name game is Jeremy and Verity’s son Crew, who goes full Bring Her Back at one point, and who unlocks the mystery around the death of his sister and Verity’s life-altering car wreck. Is everything as it seems?
On the page Verity is what it is, and Hoover’s legion of fans are going to revel in her prose, such as they are, no matter what. But translating the action to the screen demands the touch of someone like Brian De Palma or Paul Verhoeven, filmmakers with a keen sense of twisted psychology, camp or both. Just imagine where either of them goes after that gory meet cute. Delicious. The two-sides-of-the-same-coin trope that we’re supposed to infer connects Verity and Lowen is effectively non-existent; Showalter never fully mirrors the two women enough to make that stick. They both wear red dresses. Whoop-dee-doo. It doesn’t help that Johnson appears to be tripling down on her normally engaging DGAF energy, while Hathaway, to her credit, is starring in De Palma’s much campier, much more fun movie in her own head. She makes the twist upon twist upon twists work as much as they do. Hartnett, the OG Brandon Sklenar/Tyriq Withers/Scott Eastwood (the dudes in the other Hoover adaptations and do you see a pattern here?), is fine but he can do OTT with far more panache. Did you see Trap?
Bottom line, there’s always room on the schedule for accidentally subversive (Showgirls) or hyper-reality (Hobo With a Shotgun) trash, one of cinema’s most underrated pleasures. But Verity isn’t brave enough to embrace its trashy elements, and it doesn’t matter what the book is, this is a movie. And free egg tarts to anyone who can tell me why this is Cat III. In this age of low-risk major studio filmmaking – which is going to get even more risk-averse if Paramount and Warner Bros. merge – gleeful trash is a welcome diversion. Too bad no one is willing to go there.