Maddie’s Secret is one of the strangest comedies of recent years, because it’s constantly making us second-guess whether we’re supposed to respond to it as a comedy. It was written and directed by a comedian, John Early, who also stars and plays the title role in drag. It’s also a funhouse-mirror homage to made-for-TV melodramas about women with a problem, which were so straightfaced and morally unambiguous that it was easy to scoff at them.
The film’s surface suggests a postmodern farce, a Naked Gun-style spoof or a riff on the John Waters-Divine classic Polyester. But that would be too easy. Early is up to something more complicated, provocative and altogether unclassifiable with Maddie’s Secret. His film takes the shape of a parody but never completely adopts the tone of one, and in doing so, he forces us to consider how a corny old Movie of the Week might still contain truth and pathos.
Just look at Early’s performance as the earnest, pure-hearted Maddie, which could have easily become a condescending burlesque. But he’s so sincere that we come to accept him as Maddie — not just a man in a wig. Maddie works as a dishwasher at an L.A. studio that produces content for food influencers. She longs to be in front of the camera showing off her vegetarian recipes, and when one of her personal videos goes viral, she quickly becomes the online network’s newest star. But all this exposure has made her critical of her own body, and she’s again experiencing the bulimia she thought she had overcome as a teenager.
You can probably imagine the sort of tasteless jokes that a coarser movie would make, but Early handles Maddie’s bulimia with an even softer touch than the TV movies he’s referencing. (Much of the plot, by the way, is taken from the 1986 NBC movie Kate’s Secret, starring Meredith Baxter Birney.) It’s photographed in the deep shadows and vivid colors of a film by Pedro Almodóvar, who similarly loves to put clashing patterns on the same canvas.
There are touches of the absurd, including a hilariously elaborate dance sequence that goes on and on and on. The supporting performances are also balancing on a weird tonal highwire: Early’s longtime collaborator Kate Berlant as Maddie’s best friend, Eric Rahill as her teddy-bear boyfriend, Vanessa Bayer as an eating disorder patient with a crush on her doctor, and Kristen Johnston as Maddie’s deviously self-absorbed mother.
Maddie’s Secret is less a send-up than a loving tribute, and I found myself smiling in recognition at just how accurately Early matches the beats of a TV movie: the overheated monologues, the characters who are either all good or all bad, the central conflict that’s solved after a certain number of commercial breaks. By adopting the form of a much derided genre and finding genuine heart and even ambiguity in it, Early is challenging us to take that genre seriously. Even while we’re sometimes laughing.
Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.