Movie Review: "Brittany Runs a Marathon" Gives You That Runner’s High

Jillian Bell runs rings around the competition in this crowdpleaser.

Whenever a friend says, "I’m really into running right now," it’s a reasonable first instinct to change the subject before you get stuck discussing resting heart rates and the need for good arch support.

But when Brittany O’Neill told Paul Downs Colaizzo, he went and made a film about it.

Brittany Runs a Marathon is dedicated to writer-director Colaizzo’s real-life buddy, a late-twenty-something who turned her messy life around by training for the New York City Marathon.

Jillian Bell, who usually stars in wild comedies as the unpredictable firecracker thrown at bad situations to make them worse, plays Brittany, though, in the spirit of Colazzio’s good-natured tribute to his friend, she dials it back to meet the picture’s sweet, earnest tone. Still, with her first major leading role, Bell’s confronted with quite the challenge. Her mission isn’t simply to play an overweight woman coming to grips with her unhealthy, self-destructive lifestyle; it’s to play a person who’s so effortlessly charming, you believe her bestie would want to make a movie based on her life.

And, yeah, she pulls it off.

When we meet Brittany, she’s working a go-nowhere job and playing sidekick to her vapid friends. The only thing on her to-do list is scamming Adderall from a doctor. Instead, her GP denies her, and then tells her she’s medically obese. (You gotta hope he at least bulk bills.)

After some mild protesting, Brittany acknowledges she could take better care of herself, and starts exercising, taking the cheapest option available: running the streets of New York. She gives herself a goal, setting the 42km New York City Marathon as a benchmark for success. The problem is that it’s more than unfitness she needs to overcome, and her self-esteem is so damaged, it’s only through some new companions (including Michaela Watkins and Micah Stock as fellow runners, and the fab Utkarsh Ambudkar as a similarly aimless colleague) that she starts to see her worth.

This body-positive film doesn’t spend much time on Brittany’s weight (though Bell wears prosthetics early on). It instead focuses on the other ways she fails to respect herself, and the reasons why. Most intriguingly, when she starts to shed weight, we see her identity mutate into a differently destructive kind: She becomes angrier, perceiving the old Brittany as a doppelganger who needs to be killed off. We knew Bell could be funny; I didn’t know she could do this kind of dramatic work. (Same goes for Lil Rel Howery in a statesmanlike turn as her fatherly brother-in-law Demetrius.)

Sure, the stakes of Brittany Runs a Marathon aren’t particularly high, but Colaizzo’s observant writing and direction keep it engrossing and inspiring, especially in its surprising final act. The flick is cute without being cloying, and doesn’t race to a cheap happy ending. Besides, it's long-term growth that Brittany’s chasing anyway. It is, ahem, a marathon, not a sprint.

3.5/5

Brittany Runs a Marathon arrives in Australian cinemas 31 October. It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime Video from 15 November. It’s rated M for coarse language and sex.