Rated: M
Directed by: Nisha Ganatra
Written by: Mindy Kaling
Produced by: Mindy Kaling, Howard Klein, Jillian Apfelbaum, Ben Browning
Starring: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Amy Ryan, Hugh Dancy, Denis O’Hare, Ike Barinholtz.
They say that the 1970s was the decade that fashion forgot, but I’ve always thought it was the ’80s.
With her big padded shoulders and power dressing suits Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson), television’s first ever female late show host and comedian, has become sewn into an image she should have abandoned long ago, and her show has morphed into an outfit that is gradually making its way to the back of your wardrobe. You know the one, it has to go but you can’t quite bear to part with it.
With the axe swinging and credible rumours that she is about to be replaced with a younger male comedian, Katherine is forced into crisis mode. That means sitting down with the writers of her show for the first time ever, as she tries to work out a way to reinvent herself. Despite a steady decline in the ratings over the previous decade, Katherine’s writing team are equally wedded to their worn out methods and lame humour. That is, until their cosy boys’ club is disrupted by newcomer Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling), token female writer and woman who is not afraid to take her place on an upturned bin.
To appease the head of the network, Katherine eventually accepts that her approval rating might improve if the guests she interviews were less august. Accordingly, YouTube sensation Mimi is booked and Katherine’s steady decline is brought to a spectacular halt, when the interview goes viral: ‘For all the wrong reasons.’ Overnight Katherine is dubbed, ‘America’s least favourite aunt’.
But Katherine has even further to fall.
After a brief stint performing stand-up where she manages to raise a laugh for claiming that she is losing her show because she’s, ‘a little bit old and little bit white’, Katherine becomes convinced that the way to save herself is to find a way to address her own white privilege. Appointing herself ‘White Saviour’ is a move in the right direction, and a very funny one, but it’s not enough to quell the forces ranged against her. They’re still gunning for her show.
And they are about to pull out the big artillery.
Unless she can uncover the real reason for her failing popularity, Katherine stands to lose everything, and maybe she should. She has already skipped out on telling a socially relevant joke that Molly wrote for her, baulking at the last minute when a well-meaning colleague whispered, ‘Be careful of showing who you are, once you turn that tap on you can never turn it off again.’ Katherine’s struggle between her desire to conceal herself behind the façade of her power suits and her need to reveal her authentic self is a dilemma many of us face.
In a movie without a laugh track, I found my laughter bubbling up in an unforced way to join with the rest of the audience, even though I had expected the humour to fall flat after watching the trailer. While Mindy Kaling was a delight, it says a lot about Emma Thompson’s performance that she was able to play such a prickly, unsympathetic character, with just the tiniest glimmer of vulnerability. Without that, I might have been cheering for the other side.