Plot: Inspired by the provocative real-life story of the visionary founder of online dating platform Bumble, Swiped introduces recent college grad Whitney Wolfe as she uses extraordinary grit and ingenuity to break into the male-dominated tech industry, launch an innovative, globally lauded dating app—two, actually, and pave the way to becoming the youngest female self-made billionaire.
Review: Whitney Wolfe Herd is a fascinating public figure. At 31, she became the youngest self-made billionaire in history when she took Bumble public. After a contentious legal drama involving her tenure at Tinder dragged her name through the mud, Wolfe Herd bounced back in a tailor-made way for a Hollywood adaptation. While Swiped aims to tell the story of her rise, fall, and rise in the tech industry, the film boasts disclaimers at the beginning and the end of the film professing that the story and participants were changed for dramatic purposes. While Wolfe Herd was not a part of the production due to a binding non-disclosure agreement, Swiped paints her as a feminist icon amidst a toxic workplace culture that almost destroyed her career permanently. While there is an excellent story at its core, Swiped is constructed far too cleanly and neatly as a fable about success against all odds and avoids digging into what could have been a far more fascinating movie.
Starting in 2012, Swiped opens with Whitney Wolfe (Lily James) as she tries to find support for her app that would match volunteers with worthy volunteer opportunities. Intrigued by her energy and originality, Cardify CEO Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer) offers her a job as head of marketing for his start-up incubator that also includes a struggling dating app concept. Wolfe came up with the idea to name the app Tinder and helped spearhead a grassroots effort on college campuses to get the app traction. Wolfe also begins dating Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen (Jackson White), which grows toxic as the app grows successful. When Wolfe and Mateen break up, the two’s working dynamic becomes untenable, leading to Wolfe’s forced resignation from the company. Settling out of court and signing a non-disclosure agreement, Wolfe spirals through brutal online harassment and the inability to advocate for herself in the court of public opinion. That begins to change when Andrey Andreev (Dan Stevens) steps in to help Wolfe start her female-centric app, Bumble. The rest is history.
In condensing a decade of legal battles and tech entrepreneurship to fit into a two-hour movie, Swiped plays fast and loose with the timeline to accommodate dramatic effect. This means multiple montage sequences set to early 2000s pop songs show the increasing subscriber count on Tinder and Bumble, along with conveniently structured contrivances that allow the plot to hit the natural highs and lows of the Hollywood underdog template. Ben Schnetzer and Jackson White shift from solid coworkers supporting Whitney’s rise to prominence, and then devolve into caricatures of bro-first masculinity as the Tinder work environment becomes hostile and full of cliches like calling female coworkers sluts and whores while playing paintball in the office. Aside from Wolfe, the film centers on a few female employees at Tinder, with Beth (Mary Neely) shown as constantly being talked over by coworkers and relegated to deleting dick pics despite a Cornell degree. We also get surface-level details of Whitney’s friend and co-worker, Tisha (Myha’la), who is in a band by night but suffers the same tedious work environment. Eventually, these women succeed at Bumble, all structured at too surface level to resonate.
What rescues Swiped from being a waste is Lily James’ portrayal of Whitney Wolfe Herd. Just a month older than the woman she is playing, James is fantastic in this performance, which allows her to show her natural charisma as much as it does Wolfe’s struggles with panic attacks following her settlement with Tinder. While the film sometimes wraps things up too neatly, it does offer a solid middle act that allows Lily James to dig into the inner strength and resilience that make Wolfe such an intriguing business person. Like Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs, Swiped gives Lily James a solid character to dig into while not shying away from some of her struggles during her journey to prominence. We also get a Downton Abbey reunion as Lily James and Dan Stevens reunite for the first time on screen in years, but I had hoped it would have come with more nuance and transparency.
While based on articles and research about Whitney Wolfe Herd, the lack of participation from the Bumble CEO due to her NDA means that writers Rachel Lee Goldenberg, Bill Parker, and Kim Caramele are not necessarily going to get called out about the factual accuracy of Swiped. The film definitely paints Tinder as a terrible and chauvinistic environment and smears Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, calling out the bad behavior of Andrey Andreev’s company, Badoo. Still, it all seems to exist only to facilitate some preaching about what is vital in Wolfe’s quest to make Bumble a good experience for women. Rachel Lee Goldenberg directs Swiped in a way that never digs beyond the story’s surface, instead trying to hit all of the key moments in the decade-long rise of Whitney Wolfe Herd. The story’s convenience often feels artificial and detracts from the essential truth behind the scenes.
Swiped‘s perspective on the lack of female presence in tech organizations’ leadership is an important one that deserved a more assertive stance than we get in this too-sanitized biopic. The Social Network and Steve Jobs presented unflinching and unflattering looks at two of the most resonant tech leaders of the last thirty years, and Whitney Wolfe Herd deserved to have her story right alongside them. While Lily James delivers an outstanding performance, the film around her does not live up to her acting. Swiped is an inspirational story that deserves a broad audience to reinforce the message that women in technology should not be dissuaded from pursuing greatness. Still, it could have been done so much better. With a tone that shifts between too light and too dark and never digging deeply into the unsettling lack of safety on dating apps, Swiped avoids making a concrete point about anything other than Whitney Wolfe Herd’s deserved rebound from a terrible injustice to become one of the most important people working in tech today.
Swiped premieres on Hulu on September 19th.
Source:
JoBlo.com
