Nicola Peltz Beckham in the movie «Lola»
Her name is Lola, she is a poor girl. The character is introduced at the beginning of the acclaimed new film of the same name, applying makeup and occasionally stopping to snort drugs. Bathed in hazy morning light, the camera lingers dreamily on the wide, expressive eyes of the actress playing Lola. If you didn't know better, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled upon a full-length pastiche of a Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande pop video—it's as color-saturated, hyper-real quality as the mundane. magically realistic shine.
But there is nothing superfluous about Lola. It's the life's work of actress, celebrity and billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz Beckham. Not only does she play the eponymous lead, a loser who works in a pharmacy by day and at a strip club by night. She also wrote, directed and produced the film. Lola is her Citizen Kane, a project into which she poured all her inspiration and ambition accumulated over 29 years.
Her reward was some of the most brutal reviews this side of Game of Thrones' final season. By all accounts, the film is shameless poverty porn from an actress with a net worth of $50 million (total for her entrepreneur/investor father). and Disney thorn in the side Nelson Peltz, valued at $1.7 billion). “Poorly written script… stereotypically melodramatic story… emotional torture,” said one review. «Beckham's glorified Peltz ad… is ultimately disgraceful,» agreed the Guardian.
Lola is undeniably terrible. Peltz Beckham, who married Posh and Becks scion Brooklyn in 2022 at her father's $79 million Palm Beach estate, is a decent actress: she exuded an eerie emptiness in the underrated TV show Bates Motel.
But in «Lola,» she brings a distracting glamor to the role of a young woman who trudges through a dead-end job to support her gender-nonconforming younger brother while keeping an arm's length away from her toxic mother (Virginia Madsen, whose weary performance suggests she too well aware of the disaster in which she is involved). Even the “difficult” scenes have a soapy gloss. For example, when the strip club client snorts cocaine from Lola's belly, she is fully clothed and looks stylish, like an influencer.
And yet, despite all its flaws, is Lola as terrible as the reviews suggest? While Peltz Beckham is certainly a tourist among other people's suffering, that hardly makes her unique. How about Ron Howard's adaptation of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, an orgy of clichés about the American underclass brought to us by a director born into a show business family (his father was a director, his mother an actress) and a millionaire by then when did he turn 18?
Brooklyn Peltz Beckham and Nicola Peltz Beckham at the Lola premiere in Los Angeles in February 2024. Photo: Getty
Some might make similar criticisms of Ken Loach, who studied at Oxford and lives in leafy Hampstead while chronicling the plight of the chronically disadvantaged. Perhaps the most famous film was Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which was criticized by critics in India for its «inhumane look» at the country's poor.
The obvious difference is that Peltz Beckham isn't just rich. She is also, as the children would say, “not a baby.” The daughter of a self-made frozen food billionaire and a former Miss World, she grew up in luxury in Manhattan and was educated at a $50,000-a-year vocational children's school. Beginning her career as a child, her breakthrough came in Bates Motel, where she played the love interest of future serial killer Norman Bates (the series is a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho). This led to Michael Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction, in which she played Mark Wahlberg's daughter.
In preparation for these positions, Peltz was asked to keep diaries. They functioned as a space where she could explore her feelings and grapple with the emotions she might need, such as when she played against giant killer robots in Michael Bay's film. “Writing to me was always something personal,” she said. It was just love that I never planned to share, at least not then.»
Nicola Peltz Beckham in the movie » Lola»
She explained that Lola's idea came to her out of the blue and that she stayed up all night and day writing her thoughts down on paper. This was her Jack Kerouac moment. She wrote the script in one sentence, an emotional blur that traces Lola's transformation from a hard-working young woman to someone on the verge of an emotional breakdown (caused by the tragedy at the beginning of the film).
“I haven't slept in three days. I have screenshots taken at 4:50 in the morning, just me writing,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. “When I started writing down my thoughts, they just wouldn’t stop.”
She insisted that the project was largely autobiographical. Peltz Beckham explained that Lola's best friend in the film was based on her friend Angela. The character's tragic younger brother, meanwhile, was inspired by her godson. The biggest motivation, as she explained, was her desire to play a real outsider for once.
Nelson Peltz, Elon Musk, Nikola Peltz Beckham and Will Peltz at the premiere of the film «Lola» Photo: Getty
“I just felt like I had read a lot of scripts and wanted to play a resilient, strong girl, but I didn’t want the star of the film to always be right. I wanted it to be from her point of view, but that doesn't mean all her decisions were right,» the actress said. “I wanted to write a character who is flawed, but also someone whose heart is in the right place. I just think that's life, and the imperfections of life will always inspire me.»
Having made billions from frozen foods, her father is perhaps best known today as an «activist investor» at Disney who has repeatedly spoken out about CEO Bob Iger's failure to name a successor and claims Disney overpaid in its purchase of the 21st Century company. Fox film studio from Rupert Murdoch for $71 billion. Given such family influence, it is not surprising that Peltz managed to launch production.
«John Papsidera, the casting director, was the first person to sign me up for the project before anyone else, and I've been auditioning for him since I was 14,» she told beauty site Byrdie. “He's been in all of Christopher Nolan's films, so he's incredible. Obviously Virginia [Madsen], who is such a beautiful actress in every scene. Quincy Jones [Michael Jackson's star producer] and Mervyn Warren wrote the music, which was an absolute dream and an honor. Watching them was a wild and huge learning experience that I will treasure forever.”
Her next search was to find a director. She said that those around her considered her the ideal person for the job. Peltz Beckham agreed.
“I really wanted to find a female director because I wanted femininity and a female point of view,” she said. “But then people [suggested] I should direct because I know the characters better than anyone else. I've always wanted to direct, but never in a million years thought I'd be able to do it in something I wrote or acted in. I just jumped in and did it.”
Lola is not a wreck forever. Peltz Beckham knows how to hold a stage and is a passable director. However, it is a sharp watch. The film has a color-saturated Polaroid vibe, a disembodied quality that makes even supposedly gritty scenes (like the one at the strip club) seem like they were straight out of the Instagram feed of a one-percenter living his best life.
But it's also serious, and Peltz Beckham seems to genuinely care about the characters. She also made at least one difficult editorial decision, cutting a cameo for her husband, whose acting ability apparently makes his mother's appearance in World of Spice look like Laurence Olivier playing Richard III.
“Brooklyn is actually pretty upset that he was cut out of one little cameo. He had one line: 'Hi,' but he kept saying it in a British accent and looked straight into the camera,» she told the Hollywood Reporter. “I thought, oh God, we need to move on. Oh my God. So, Brooklyn is on the chopping block.”
Peltz Beckham may not be on the chopping block, but with Lola, she's certainly painted a target on her back. Most viewers recognize poverty porn when they see it, and that's where Lola finds herself. Perhaps Peltz Beckham should have kept her husband's awkward cameo. It would be a complete mess, but between the endless shots of Lola applying makeup, at least we'd have something to laugh about.
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