Swiped
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes
Stars: Lily James, Dan Stevens, Jackson White
Writers: Bill Parker, Rachel Lee Goldenberg, Kim Caramele
Director: Rachel Lee Goldenberg
Streaming on Hulu
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
I do hereby challenge every single male in any traditionally male profession to sit through Swiped, a painfully candid drama about one woman’s journey through the Silicon Valley Bro Culture, and not see shades of their own workplace, and maybe even themselves.
And that goes even for so-called progressive establishments that put forward an inclusive, gender-blind face. Lily James (What’s Love Got to Do with It?) stars as Whitney Wolfe Herd, the digital dynamo who co-founded the dating app Tinder. Herd was forced to quit the company in a cyclone of sexual harassment charges, and finally created Bumble, a supposedly more female-friendly dating platform.
That movie-friendly rise/fall/resurrection narrative provides the core of Swiped, but the story plays out against a culture of toxic masculinity that, some suggest, has given birth to the kind of ugly aggressiveness that seems to drive much of our online behavior to this day.
Arriving at the company that would launch Tinder, the ambitious young Herd holds her nose and plays nice with the boorish colleagues who populate an office space that not only looks like an adolescent playground — complete with a two-story slide and Nerf guns — but also operates like one, with the bullies pushing weaker coworkers to the margins and claiming credit that they don’t deserve. It’s familiar territory by now, and as such we’ve come to expect the female protagonist to spend much of the film chafing against the Boys Club atmosphere.
But cowriter/director Rachel Lee Goldenberg (TV’s Tiny Beautiful Things) doesn’t let Herd off that easy: The newly minted executive buys into the poisonous atmosphere, discounting the opinions of other women and ignoring Tinder’s growing reputation for catering to a hypersexual and often abusive male audience.
James makes a fully convincing Herd: Slowly letting her insecurities fall away but failing to replace them with a defensive shell. Of course, Herd’s membership in the Boys Club is a delusion — the moment a conflict arises with her boss/boyfriend (Jackson White) it’s Herd who’s packing her office things into a cardboard box.
A few months of paralyzing self-pity ensue, but Herd eventually reconnects with a good-natured, visionary Russian businessman who had tried to steal her away from Tinder before it all went south. Downton Abbey veteran Dan Stevens, utterly unrecognizable, plays the well-meaning businessman who discovers, to his own chagrin, that even the most well-intentioned initiatives can fall prey to long-simmering standards of inequality.
It’s James, of course, who provides the jet fuel in Swiped as it roars through the rarified air of high-level corporate sexism. As Herd stages her remarkable comeback — becoming the first female billionaire in the social media industry — James seems positively ballistic, her character progressively smarter and stronger and surer than ever.
She’s not just playing with the Big Boys—she’s rewriting the rules.
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