Producers: Jennifer Gibgot, Andrew Panay and Lily James Director: Rachel Lee Goldenberg Screenplay: Bill Parker, Rachel Lee Goldenberg and Kim Caramele Cast: Lily James, Ben Schnetzer, Myha’la, Jackson White, Dan Stevens, Ian Colletti, Mary Neely, Ana Yi Puig, Aidan Laprete, Pedro Correa, Pierson Fodé, Joely Fisher, Kai Van Moorsel, Michael Nouri, Coral Peña and Dermot Mulroney Distributor: Hulu/20th Century Studios
Grade: C
The entrepreneurial spirit, always a reliable subject for filmmakers—whether the story is triumphant or the reverse—takes a feminist slant in Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s slick but superficial biographical film about Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the online dating app Bumble who became the world’s youngest female billionaire after taking the company public. As presented by writer-director Goldenberg, it’s a tale of meteoric early success, a sudden fall, and an astronomical resurrection that comes across as smoothed out and simplified for easy consumption.
The script by Goldenberg, Bill Parker and Kim Caramele doesn’t try to cover Wolfe Herd’s entire life: it begins in 2012, when, played by Lily James, she was a socially-conscious SMU grad seeking financial support for an app that would connect prospective volunteers with orphanages they could help. Her pitch to a rowdy crowd of ambitious tech bros at a conference goes nowhere until she’s leaving, when she bumps into Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer), an engaging guy who runs a San Francisco-based incubator and is impressed by her enthusiasm if not what she’s promoting. He invites her to join his firm to help with Cardify, an idea for a loyalty-card buying program, but her attention quickly turns to another potential product, a dating app.
In this telling, she’s the one who transforms the inchoate idea by suggesting first the right-or-left “swipe” move that would indicate a user’s “yes” or “no” to a candidate and then the brand name Tinder. She also shows her savvy at marketing it to the frat boys and sorority gals on college campuses. Tinder becomes an enormous success, and Wolfe, as she then was known, becomes a star in the company. She also becomes the girlfriend of Sean’s pal Justin Mateen (Jackson White), whom Rad names a co-founder of the business.
But things turn sour for Wolfe fast. Complaints from users about increasingly gross behavior by Tinder users—guys sending dick pics and worse—multiply and little’s done to curtail it. Mateen, moreover, grows increasingly possessive and intimidating, and while commiserating Rad takes no firm action. Wolfe realizes that she’s stuck in a workplace rife with toxic masculinity in which she wrongly thought her star quality protected her (if not other female employees), and eventually she’s not only forced out, but her contributions to the success of Tinder are themselves stolen, or “swiped” if you prefer, and her character blackened. She sues, but lawyers persuade her to settle for a million-dollar payout, though to get it she has to sign an NDA. (Because it’s still in effect, a closing caption informs us that she was not involved in the making of “Swiped,” the script of which Goldenberg based on other sources. But the result is something she could hardly find fault with.)
Her career in tatters, she moves to Austin—a ridiculously on-the-nose montage introduces the Texas city with shots of the capitol building and, God help us, a longhorn steer!—where she develops an idea for a female-friendly dating app and recruits a couple of former Tinder colleagues, Tisha (Myha’la) and Beth (Mary Neely), to join her in developing it. Funding comes from Andrey Andreev (Dan Stevens), the charmingly off-the-wall founder of the blockbuster European dating app Badoo who’d earlier tried to poach Wolfe from Tinder. The result, Bumble, is a smash hit. Whitney also finds a supportive husband in Michael Herd (Pierson Fodé), a handsome cowboy she meets—in a not-so-subtle dig at the tech culture—not online but in an Austin honkey-tonk.
But that’s not the end of Wolfe Herd’s challenges. When Badoo is charged with sexual harassment issues and a toxic work culture in 2018, she has to decide whether to break with Andreev or try to skirt the issue. The brouhaha could tarnish Bumble’s reputation, and hers, but instead it leads to Badoo’s takeover by Blackstone in 2019, and to a surprise offer to Wolfe Herd from the new owner’s emissary (Dermot Mulroney). It’s with her elevation to the summit that “Swiped” ends, ignoring some interesting developments since then, including provocative suggestions Wolfe Herd has recently made about the use of AI in future dating apps.
Indeed, “Swiped” feels like an airbrushed portrait that carefully excises anything about Wolfe Herd that might be more than momentarily problematic, like her drive to succeed and her naïveté in failing to see how the toxic culture at Tinder took aim at other women while giving her a temporary pass, until her complaints brought the full brunt of it on her too. On the other hand, it’s unapologetic in its depiction of the frat-boy workplace style fostered by Rad, Mateen and their pals, in which open spaces were more like permanent playrooms than offices and sniggering comments about women were prevalent. Credit production designer Hillary Gurtler and costumer Beth Morgan for that, as well as cinematographer Doug Emmett for capturing the ambience of the time, editor Julia Wong for pushing past any obstacles that might have impeded the you-go-girl through line (including the rushed feel at the close that underplays the Badoo scandal no less than it does the impact of Whitney’s marriage) and Chanda Dancy for a score that evokes the era.
James registers fairly well as Wolfe Herd, catching the perkiness of the hopeful college grad early on and the angry disillusionment of the betrayed employee before sailing all too easily into the privileged executive offices she inhabits in the last act, but her performance is mostly a surface affair devoid of much real depth. Most of the other actors provide one-note views of their characters (Myha’la the exuberant best friend, White the guy whose slightly creepy mien erupts into full-bore misogyny, something telegraphed from the start, Fodé blankly handsome goodness). But there are exceptions: Schnetzer manages to keep you guessing about Sean till his last onscreen moment, and chameleonic Stevens offers a take on Andreev that might not be accurate but is cheeky and amusing.
One watches “Swiped” with increasing disappointment, the feeling that a chance to do something that digs into the reality of a corrupt corporate system has been sidestepped in favor of a simpleminded rise-fall-resurrection scenario. It’s okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.