In 2010, “The Social Network” kicked off an operatic mini-genre: the start-up epic, centering on the founding — and usually, the myth-weaving founder — of some product or app that the audience has almost certainly used. In the 15 years since, we have been treated to movies and mini-series of varying quality about the foundings and falls, and sometimes resurrections, of WeWork and Uber, Theranos and BlackBerry, Nike and Apple, and, you might even argue, Fyre Festival.
“Swiped,” directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, sits comfortably in the lineage of the start-up epic even if the category, like the millennial generation it often chronicles, is getting a teensy bit long in the tooth. (As someone who had a LiveJournal and a GeoCities site, I’m allowed to say that.) The focus of “Swiped” is the dawn of app-based online dating, and specifically its godmother, Whitney Wolfe Herd. She is the executive at Tinder who exited the company in 2014 after accusing co-workers of sexual harassment. She then founded the competing app Bumble, which billed itself as a safer dating app alternative for women.
According to text that appears at the end of “Swiped,” Wolfe Herd didn’t participate in the making of the film, because she is still under a nondisclosure agreement. Instead, Goldenberg, who wrote the screenplay with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele, used articles, court documents and social media posts to construct the story. Lily James stars as Whitney, playing her as a breezy and idealistic new college graduate whose experience in male-dominated computer science classes has inured her to the kind of sexism that was rampant in start-ups in the early 2010s. But a chance meeting with an incubator founder (Ben Schnetzer) puts her squarely in the middle of the breakneck, all-or-nothing culture of the moment, and her instincts make her a star.
James is an appealing actress, with a broad smile and open expression that can come across as artless, in just the right way: Whitney needs to be innocent and almost naïve when she first arrives at the incubator, but smart as a whip and capable. Yet the longer she’s at the company, the more we see her vulnerabilities: Though “Swiped” depicts her as responsible for much of Tinder’s success, she’s also sidelined and subjected to harassment and verbal abuse by her boyfriend (Jackson White), who is also one of her co-workers, and eventually pushed out altogether. James has a great capacity to pull fragility and strength together, and her performance is the movie’s backbone.
The movie itself is both shakier and shallower. “Swiped” aims to explore the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world, from workplaces to the internet more widely. It does so in broad strokes with predictable characterization. Whitney must learn the hard way that maintaining a cool girl image won’t save her when the boys band together. The screenplay runs down a litany of indignities familiar to women in certain sorts of workplaces — the man who takes credit for her ideas, the man who gets huffy when she is successful, the man who gaslights her, the apoplectic man who accuses her of interrupting him or tells her to “calm down.” Eventually she realizes that, as she puts it, “I bought into the idea that there was space for only one woman in the room, and I made sure it was me.” It can be cathartic to watch, in its own way, but it feels one-note.
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The post ‘Swiped’ Review: A Woman in a Man’s World appeared first on New York Times.
