John Early’s Maddie’s Secret is a movie that shouldn’t have worked. It’s a John Waters homage, and almost everybody in the cast has been associated with comedy for their whole careers. But despite some laughs here and there, it’s not a pure comedy, and it gets dark at points.
Maddie’s Secret is simultaneously a satire of the Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s, the TV movies-of-the-week of the 1980s, the food-influencer social-media culture of today, and the food drama The Bear (with a parody called The Bore). The film has enough influences that New York’s Metrograph theater has programmed an entire series of films that inspired it, which also includes Showgirls and Clockwatchers.
But beneath all of that, it’s also sincere about its subject. The project is a huge swing, but one that mostly connects.
Early, a veteran of the alt-comedy scene spanning film, TV, theater, and podcasts, is the writer, director, and star, portraying Maddie. The character’s a young female staffer for a Bon Appetit-like YouTube cooking channel, married to a kind but clueless husband (Eric Rahill). Maddie soon launches an influencer career on her own, but with success comes the return of her long-dormant bulimia, and by the end there’s some background as to what brought it on.
It’s a male actor playing a female character, and also one who’s meant to be a bit younger than the 38-year-old Early. The cross-gender casting represents a clear nod to the way Divine used to play cis women in John Waters’ movies. Early’s a gay man but is not transgender or associated with drag performance; the casting isn’t meant as commentary on modern gender controversies. But the film’s structured so that Maddie could’ve been played by a 25-year-old actress, and nothing about the plot would’ve needed to change.
In the second act, the film turns into Girl Interrupted, with Maddie in an eating disorder treatment facility, where her roommate is SNL veteran Vanessa Bayer (one of a long list of I Think You Should Leave alumni in the film, which also includes Early himself, his longtime collaborator Kate Berlant, Conner O’Malley, and others; O’Malley and Rahill together made the great underground comedy Rap World). Veteran character actor Chris Bauer, a rare non-comedian in the cast, appears as the head of the eating-disorder clinic.
Meanwhile, Kristen Johnson plays Maddie’s horrible mom, who rivals Kyra Sedgewick’s turn in Carolina Caroline as the year’s most monstrous movie mother. The film, non-traditional as it is, takes Maddie’s dilemma seriously, but never in a hectoring or heavy-handed way. Challenging as this premise was, Maddie’s Secret represents a successful debut.