Maddie’s Secret Feels Like an Attempt to Outrun Irony

Maddie’s Secret is to TV movies what Far From Heaven is to Douglas Sirk — an homage to the flatly lit morality and cautionary tales of the ’80s and ’90s that approaches their small screen seriousness as though it were a walled-off kingdom that director, writer, and star John Early is attempting to breach. Which, in plenty of ways, it is. We don’t make movies like Kate’s Secret, the 1986 NBC original that most heavily inspired this one, anymore, with its mesmerizing scenes of Meredith Baxter Birney, who plays a housewife trying to hide her bulimia nervosa, huddled in the corner of a grocery store surreptitiously shoving cookies into her mouth, only to purge soon after. Their outmoded style, with its seriousness and corniness, its big acting choices and low budgets, is basically impossible to recreate without falling into parody. But while Maddie’s Secret is packed with funny people, including Eric Rahill as the title character’s adoring husband Jake, Kate Berlant as her possessive bestie Deena, and Claudia O’Doherty, Conner O’Malley, and Vanessa Bayer in other supporting roles, it isn’t exactly a comedy. Or rather, its intent is not to skewer its source material, which was never held in high esteem to begin with. There are definitely laughs in Maddie’s Secret, but the point of the movie is almost to get beyond them, to the place where naive hokum could yield moments of inexplicable resonance.

It’s a strange, strange movie, but a thoroughly compelling one, thanks in large part to Early’s performance as Maddie, a dishwasher at Gourmaybe, a cooking channel not unlike a certain Condé Nast test kitchen. Maddie is an avowed good girl who loves plant-based eating and going for long runs, and who maintains a kind word for everyone. Early doesn’t approach her through the lens of drag. In a blonde wig, light makeup, and a series of baby tees, he is seizing the chance, as he puts it, to play the ingénue. And he plays her straight, albeit with the fundamental ridiculousness of a character at the center of a torrid eating disorder melodrama. Maddie’s story, which involves a viral eggplant-mango smashburger recipe vaulting her from back-of-the-house to on-screen talent, with the extra scrutiny and pressure retriggering the bulimia she thought she’s put behind her, is one in which the stakes are relatively low, but the highs are nevertheless very high and the lows Mariana Trench low. There’s plenty of absurdity to what Early’s doing, whether it’s in the scene in which a spiraling Maddie pushes herself to the brink of collapse during a dance class or during the moment his face goes perfectly frozen when a character congratulates Maddie on her “healthy” body, but it’s never done with a trace of a wink. 

What Maddie’s Secret does make fun of, albeit only as a secondary priority, is the world of millennial foodieism — the cattiness and competition built into outwardly chipper online fame, highbrow approaches to lowbrow foods, and a sea of white influencers brightly talking about the Filipino flavors in their latest recipe. Maddie’s genuine nature propels her to new online heights, but she is also utterly oblivious to the fact that her on-camera eating veers into the erotic, like an unknowing SoCal Nigella Lawson who ends each video with sauce running down the side of her mouth. She hates the way she looks on camera, so of course, fame can’t help coming her way, including an opportunity to compete against Gourmaybe star Emily (O’Doherty) for a coveted spot designing a menu for The Boar, a Bear-like drama that Maddie, who doesn’t own a TV, hadn’t previously been aware of. The more she pushes herself, the more she’s immersed in food, which is both her obsession and her form of self-flagellation. It comes to a point where she’s stuffing fistfuls of prepared dishes into her mouth and then scurrying away to the bathroom for some ritualized vomiting. Even so, her spiral downward to near death before ending up in treatment is ridiculously, gloriously brisk.

I regularly hear complaints about laughter at repertory screenings, about how audiences these days compulsively laugh at anything that reads as out of date, whether it’s meant to be humorous or not. “Hipster laughing” can be annoying, I know, though I think it’s also easy to misread as sneering when it’s something more complicated — an acknowledgement of the way that things that were once widespread, whether it’s genre stereotypes or hairstyles or language, can with time feel downright alien. Maddie’s Secret, which tracks the tropes of its genre like they’re the stations of the cross, and which makes a delighted joke out of a predatory lesbian cliché, exists in that tension, in the bemused chuckle, and in the attempt to outrun irony when it’s everywhere. It sometimes feels like it was made for an audience of one, its creator, but it’s also such a labor of love that it’s impossible not to feel at least some of what he did when he set out to make it.