A movie steeped in ignorance will likely not affect Nicola Peltz Beckham’s career — but its messaging could potentially bolster unfair stereotypes about poverty.
Nicola, who is the daughter of billionaire businessman and investor Nelson Peltz and daughter-in-law of power couple David and Victoria Beckham, is receiving criticism for her film, Lola.
The movie, which marks Nicola’s writing and directorial debut – as well as her first leading role – premiered in February with a limited theatrical and digital release.
However, it is now garnering attention thanks to a scathing review published last week in The Guardian by writer and filmmaker Kady Ruth Ashcraft, who described the film as “a bad movie” and “poverty porn”.
“Peltz Beckham did achieve something with Lola: it’s called ‘poverty porn,’” Ashcraft wrote. “And in film, that means the exploitation of the conditions of poverty for entertainment and artistic recognition.”
She later added: “What makes Lola such a flagrant example of poverty porn is just how careless the project feels in the context of Peltz Beckham’s exceptionally lavish life.”
HuffPost has reached out to Nicola Peltz Beckham for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
According to a plot synopsis on IMDb, Nicola plays the titular Lola, 19-year-old woman who is trying to save enough money to get herself and her little brother, Arlo (Luke David Blumm), out of their mother Mona’s (Virginia Madsen) toxic home.
Lola hopes to do this by working two jobs: at a drugstore with her best friend, Babina (Raven Goodwin), and dancing at a strip club.
Nicola previously told WWD that she wrote the initial script for Lola six years ago over the course of three days. Based on Ashcraft’s review of the film, it comes off like it was written without care, knowledge or even curiosity about the nuances of living as a poor person, with Ashcraft writing that Peltz Beckham “cosplays a disadvantaged darling, dressed up in despair drag, in a film whose message about hardship could be summed up as ‘pout your way out of poverty.’”
Film critic Ayeen Forootan also criticized Lola in a review for the website In Review Online. Although he praised the visual design of the film, Forootan went on to say that it was a “poorly scripted and stereotypically melodramatic story”.
Ashcraft and Forootan weren’t the only film critics to pan Lola. In a review for Spectrum Culture, journalist Andrew Burton wrote that Nicola’s lack of understanding about the realities of being poor is hard to ignore while watching the film.
“It’s not a law that directors making slice-of-life flicks must be personally familiar with the material they are depicting, but before even watching Lola, the disconnect between the dead-end world the film takes place in and Peltz Beckham’s background stands out as jarring,” Burton wrote.
“One can’t help but feel that the project is doomed from the get-go because it is conceptually untenable.”
If these reviews haven’t deterred you from wanting to watch Lola for yourself, the movie is now available to watch on Apple TV+ and Prime Video.