"Brittany Runs a Marathon"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Brittany Runs a Marathon is about a woman named Brittany who decides, because a doctor tells her she's going nowhere fast, to start running, and eventually decides to run a marathon. It is, on one level, as straightforward as it seems.

Yet there is something much more going on in this movie by writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo.  It watches Brittany (a gloriously committed Jillian Bell) trying to do the hardest thing of all: change. It's a movie about how our identities are often tied not to the best vision of ourselves but to the wrong-headed, unhappy ideas we have about ourselves in our moments of doubt. The joy and inspiration of Brittany Runs a Marathon comes from the kind and gentle ways it gets us to realize that we are all prisoners of those ideas, and if you think you aren't, you just aren't thinking hard enough. 

As she learns about herself, Brittany finds friendship (played by Michaela Watkins and Micah Stock, who are both excellent) and  an unexpected romance with a man seemingly as shiftless as she (Utkarsh Ambudkar), even while she rather viciously sabotages her own success by insisting she couldn't possible deserve any of it. 

Brittany Runs a Marathon is about Brittany's marathon, yes. But this simple and sweet film is really about the marathon we're all running, every single day, and how we've gotten so obsessed with thinking we need to win that we forget the real victory is just making it to the finish line.

Viewed Sept. 7, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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