"Relay" and "Swiped"

How about a Lily James double feature today?

"Relay" is a new thriller from British director David Mackenzie, which has a very good first two acts, before a rather generic and unwieldy third act deflates it.  However, those first two thirds are good enough that "Relay" really should be getting more attention.  It's set in the modern day, but has the sensibilities of a much older film, specifically the paranoid neo-noirs of the '70s like "Klute" and "Marathon Man."

An anonymous fixer (Riz Ahmed) operating in New York City, helps out whistleblowers and other victims of corrupt corporations by acting as an intermediary.  He only communicates through the Tri-State area relay service for the deaf, meant to assist those with hearing disabilities communicate via telephone, because its ironclad privacy guarantees ensure he can never be traced.  A woman named Sarah Grant (Lily James) becomes his newest client, because she's being targeted by her former employers for taking incriminating documents.  A team led by a man named Dawson (Sam Worthington) is surveilling her.   

I don't want to get too much into the particulars of the plot, because "Relay" is the kind of film that reveals information slowly, and you don't learn certain things about the characters until you need to.  That willingness to maintain the ambiguity for so long is what helps give "Relay" an uncommon enigmatic atmosphere and persistent tension.  It's also a rare thriller that was shot almost entirely on location in New York and New Jersey, so it feels very grounded and genuine compared to similar films.  This also makes the fixer's carefully planned, impossibly perfect schemes, executed with lo-tech ingenuity, all the more impressive to see play out.    

Riz Ahmed and Lily James are both very good in this movie, credibly building a relationship through a series of tense phone calls conducted through intermediaries.  They both spend long stretches of screentime alone in the frame.  Many of the action and chase sequences featuring Ahmed are carried out in silence, and you can't take your eyes off him.  However, Lily James has no trouble carrying the film by herself, especially in the first half where she's the main driving force of the story.  "Relay" is a very no frills genre piece that's a refreshing break from the norm, and impresses with solid fundamentals and a few new twists on classic tropes.

Now, on to "Swiped," which is a middling tech entrepreneur biopic about  Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, and one of the co-founders of Tinder.  Lily James plays Wolfe, from naive nonprofit booster, to the Chief of Marketing at Tinder in its crucial early days, to harassment survivor determined to beat her former colleagues at their own game.  "Swiped" ends up being a mishmash of Silicon Valley tell-all tropes and female-centric melodrama.  But after several years of much juicier projects about the rise and fall of tech startups, Wolfe finding herself on the wrong side of tech bro culture feels rather ho-hum. The only thing remotely novel is a subplot with a Tinder Co-worker, Tisha (Myha'la), who gets Wolfe to recognize her own attractive white woman privilege over the course of the film.

Wolfe's story is rendered in the most unsurprising terms, and James is so much better than this material deserves.  She's able to give a certain level of believability to the haphazardly constructed story (large portions of which were invented because Wolfe didn't participate in the making of the film) by effortlessly conveying that Wolfe is intelligent, charismatic, and naive enough to ignore all the red flags thrown up by Tinder co-founders Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer) and Justin Mateen (Jackson White).  However, by the time Dan Stevens shows up, halfway through the film to play Wolfe's financial backer Andrey Andreev with the same wacky Russian accent he used in the Eurovision movie, it's pretty clear that "Swiped" has little interest in exploring its heroine in much depth.

Wolfe is framed as the youngest female self-made billionaire, and clearly the filmmakers were going to strive to stay on her good side and portray her in the best light possible.  However, reducing her to the heroine of a tepid girl-power Lifetime movie feels like such a disservice.  And Lily James should be getting far better roles than this.

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