I Feel Pretty (2018)

The head injury is the engine of the thing. Renee Bennett, a woman of ordinary appearance and deep self-doubt, strikes her skull and wakes convinced she has become beautiful. She has not. The joke, such as it is, lives in the gap between her perception and everyone else's, and the film spends most of its running time in that gap, cheerfully, before deciding it has a lesson to deliver.

The picture's real investment is in body image, and it commits to that theme with a sincerity that borders on the sermon. Renee's arc bends toward a public confession of self-acceptance, staged at a cosmetics launch, complete with a collage of real women and an address to the room about loving what you see in the mirror. The message arrives without irony or restraint. The beauty industry takes a moderate drubbing for its narrow standards, though the drubbing ends in a promotion, a thriving product line, and a warm reconciliation with the executives who run the place. The critique of capital here is decorative.

Elsewhere the film keeps its cultural ambitions narrow. Its supporting cast is diverse in a casual way, and race never becomes a subject of the screenplay. There is no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no interest in neurodivergence, no engagement with history. The remainder is a feminist comedy about a woman learning to like herself, made by women, and criticized from several directions for how it went about it. Critics found it muddled. Audiences graded it kindly. The film wants to say something true about self-worth and mostly does, loudly, at the end, in a conference room.