Bennifer’s unravelling gives audiences a front-row seat
THE GREATEST LOVE STORY NEVER TOLD
Prime Video
Bennifer is, once again, no more. After months of “concerned” tabloid speculation, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have decided to end their marriage and in the process shaken our faith in second-chance happy endings to the core. In trying to understand what went wrong for this on-again-off-again power couple (they were engaged back in the early noughties as well) the black box that tells us everything is J Lo’s recently released documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told and, knowing what comes later, it’s a fascinating watch.
Billed as a behind-the-scenes look at the singer’s self-financed movie-album comeback, it’s also an absolutely riveting anatomy of a bad relationship. To say that anyone who watches it would see divorce court up ahead is an understatement.
The subject matter for the whole project is the relationship with Affleck, for whom J Lo apparently carried a torch all these years. Even while she was “compulsively” getting married to other people, she pined for Affleck, and now she’s “ready to tell the truth about my personal life”. Ben is vehemently not on board for this. There is a scene early on when he winces as he realises she has shown her crew a box of letters sent to her and says that they’ve given him the nickname “Pen Affleck”. He keeps muttering that private lives should stay private.
When Affleck listens to J Lo mispronounce words in the script she allegedly wrote, he takes a look and points out that she wasn’t 28 when they first met. She protests that this isn’t really her in the script, but rather a semi-autobiographical character based on her.
“So... real life... but younger,” he deadpans.
Affleck is not the only one who was sceptical in real time. We’re constantly reminded that major streaming services and production companies passed multiple times on collaborating with J Lo on this confused mixture of reality TV and music video, which prompted her to finance it herself. This dynamic means that her minions are constantly reminded of the need to save money and J Lo seems to work herself into a permanent tizzy about having to “do everything” while not doing anything really.
J Lo was always something of a group effort. On her early records there are entire parts where her own voice is replaced by others . This time round her agent oversees the writing, making suggestions, and Jenny from the block’s entire creative process consists of sitting on a couch telling people to work harder with less resources. If they can’t get it right she just leaves – there’s a hilarious and surreal scene of a group of underlings holding different kinds of mud through a car window for her approval for use on set, while she prepares to be driven off. I’m guessing this is meant to depict her as some kind of in-control boss girl, but she comes across as a raging narcissist.
The whole way through the film J Lo sounds as though she’s in a marketing pitch meeting where the product is herself, while dangling the tabloid catnip of further dish on her relationship with Affleck.
She compares herself to Prince when he was making Purple Rain. A more accurate comparison might be early 1990s Madonna when she was making Truth or Dare and being a brat to Warren Beatty.
The difference is that Madonna’s backdrop was the era-defining Blonde Ambition Tour and music video milestones like Vogue. J Lo can only offer recreations of her past weddings, playing her younger self in a tacky dress and in between scenes that are so cheesy they’re funny (at one point huge tears plop down on a letter).
At times J Lo does become tremulous under the apparent burden of her own dogged creativity, but the real flashes of emotional insight come from Affleck, who frames her need for attention as something similar to his own alcoholism, for which he is in recovery. At a certain point, he says, he realised that there wasn’t enough “liquor in all the world” to fill the hole inside himself. And by the sounds of it, he was already full up to here with J Lo.