Film review: Your Fat Friend

I actually entered this review into a national competition.  It didn’t win, but I worked hard on it (including watching it five times, painstakingly observing its nuances and expressions, and scribbling over 50 A4 pages of notes!) so here it is in all its glory.  Oh – and Your Fat Friend is a gorgeous film that needs to be watched, in case that isn’t obvious from the below.

Your Fat Friend 

Aubrey Gordon floats alone.  She’s weightless in vast, crystal-clear Oregonian waters, her modest black swimsuit offset by the ostentatious rural vista.  Gordon was a competitive swimmer as a child.  Now in her mid-thirties, she doesn’t swim in public.  Other people’s reactions to her near 25-stone body make it “hard to feel unleashed.”

Gordon is filming an independent documentary called Your Fat Friend.  It’s 2016, and she’s the anonymous author of an activist blog – her pseudonym is also Your Fat Friend – that asks the world to treat fat people like people.  To “just say fat”, without loading a factual three-letter word with connotations of laziness and unlovability.

Hilary Mantel wrote, “perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to know what fat is like.”  Gordon’s writing, vivid and direct, experiences the state on her readers’ behalf.  Filmed over six years – some of it by Gordon herself during the first Covid-19 lockdown – the documentary is a quirky, intimate portrait of her rise to public prominence.

Jeanie Finlay, the film’s award-winning director, is a self-confessed teller of shy people’s stories (she also directed Seahorse, a 2019 film about a transgender man who gives birth). Her unobtrusive style matches Gordon’s personality, in its unrelenting compassion and attention to emotional detail.  Clips include uplifting depictions of fat bodies. There’s fuzzy 90’s home-video footage of Gordon as a chubby child, with baby-blue eyes and a heart-piercing smile.

Unfashionably, there’s consistent refusal to spark conflict.

Even after Gordon reveals her identity; as her father orders her an unnecessarily sugar-and-gluten-free birthday cake; as friends enthuse over diets and gripe about body size as if she’s not there, her feelings and activism are politely confined to the page.  Gordon survives in-person encounters by “building up a charm offensive”.  Expressing her whole self feels safer in writing, for people to discover only if they choose.

Many do. Gordon’s words are republished in global media; shared by the likes of James Corden, Monica Lewinsky, and Adele.  She’s offered a book deal (“a Cinderella moment”) in the non-profit office where she works, where nobody knows she writes.  She co-founds a podcast called Maintenance Phase, which challenges weight-loss myths with humour and research.

The podcast wins an award. The book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, attracts glowing reviews.  It’s launched in a raucous, heaving bookstore event, during which Gordon apologises for swearing in front of the children’s books.

This is where the film leaves us: on a resounding high we saw coming together.

Gordon jokes about the clothes she’ll wear for the book’s photoshoot: the first time most people will see her.  She writes and vents from the sanctuary of her parked car.  She wrestles with praise (“people really respond to my laugh,” she muses, amazed) and is pragmatic in the face of trolls bleating that she’d be better off dead.  Chillingly, one shares her personal details online, “for sport”.

The film also highlights Gordon’s long-divorced parents, Rusty and Pam, who face their individual, imperfect reactions to having a fat child in the age of heroin chic.  Pam, a former “Weight Watchers’ mom” who sent her 11-year-old daughter to fat camps, is loving and contrite.  “Her size was my responsibility,” she tells Finlay, “so I took action, but I didn’t really believe in it.”  In another scene, Gordon gently explains that she took more about what to think of her body from how negatively Pam had viewed her own.  “Well, that’s how it gets passed along,” her mother replies, sadly.

Rusty, a former airline pilot who left the family when Gordon was a child, is clumsily getting to know her as an adult.  If there’s a moment to well up, it’s at his astounded reaction to Gordon’s packed-out book launch (he has not read much of her writing).  He nudges the stranger sitting next to him. “That’s my daughter!” he whispers, tearful with pride.

The film could have delved deeper into moments when Gordon is at her steeliest, quoting rigorously-researched facts about diets and dieting, and her most vulnerable.

Shelling prawns in her kitchen, she touches on her sad, complicated history with disordered eating.  She’s never sought help because she’s not sure who’d listen: nobody believes a fat person could exhibit the behaviour of an anorexic and still be fat. (Gordon’s podcast has since tackled Ozempic.  She doesn’t think the drug will eradicate fat people and hates the glee expressed by those who believe it will).

Essentially, Your Fat Friend is about the constellation of personal impacts Gordon has made. “I’m here because you’re awesome,” an excited fan gushes at the book launch, newborn baby in tow.  Another read Gordon’s writing at the height of an eating disorder.  “It changed the way I’m feeling about everything and I’m better now”.