Can You Keep a Secret? (2019)

The 2019 romantic comedy Can You Keep a Secret? arrives with the modest ambition of a paperback left in a hotel drawer, and it fulfills that ambition with reasonable competence. Emma Corrigan, a junior marketing representative at an organic food company, confesses her entire interior life to a handsome stranger during a turbulent flight, then discovers he is the company's elusive chief executive. The premise is one of those contrivances the genre has leaned on for decades, and the film treats it with the appropriate lack of gravity. It is based on Sophie Kinsella's 2003 novel, which explains the structure, and the screenplay does little to improve on it.

Elise Duran directs, and Alexandra Daddario's Emma rejects a dead-end boyfriend, pursues a promotion, and demands credit a male colleague has stolen, which supplies a mild feminist current of the sort the genre has carried since the 1990s. The supporting ensemble includes Laverne Cox, Kimiko Glenn, and Sunita Mani, a gesture toward variety in a form that has historically been narrow in its casting. None of these performers are asked to say anything about identity, and the film does not appear to have considered asking. Race never surfaces as a subject. The organic food company is a marketing backdrop, not an environmental argument. The chief executive romance is wish fulfillment, not a critique of concentrated wealth. Body image, neurodivergence, and history go entirely unaddressed.

The film's instructional ambitions are close to zero, which in this climate registers as a small mercy. It wants to amuse, and it mostly fails at that, having earned a 30 percent approval rating and a limited foreign release that returned 1.6 million dollars. What remains is a document of a genre running on fumes, pleasant enough in its casting and its scenery, devoid of any message beyond the durable proposition that a woman should be loved for her true self. That proposition is old, humane, and free of contemporary social instruction. We file it accordingly, with a weary nod and a low number.

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