Typically levity does obtain liftoff. Typically, Lopez can trick you into believing that life needs to be a parka hood with a mile of fur trim or a large home together with your nickname tiled throughout in knockoff glamour. But when “This Is Me … Now” is to be believed, it’s a mansion for one. She has solely ever needed to provide us what she’s needed for herself but by no means convincingly attained: consolation.
Lopez needs, wants, hungers, craves, needs, seeks, pines, needs, goals, hopes, believes, yearns, aches, hustles. You may see all of that within the exhausting violence of her dancing — nothing comes simple, nothing flows. It’s a whole lot of bursts and breaks. (Right here, she even retains within the sound of the dancer’s rustling cloth.) For 30 years she’s been at this: Mere leisure won’t be sufficient. Lopez has all the time appeared out to show, not often to savor, relish or bask. On the 23-year-old remix of her hit music “I’m Actual,” Lopez coos that second phrase, remodeling it from a declaration of reality to a matter of existential doubt.
“This Is Me … Now” might simply have been customary as a pure valentine to her present husband, Ben Affleck; the album makes room for one, “Expensive Ben, Pt. II.” As an alternative, Affleck might be discovered barking beneath coats of make-up as a cable information troll. Why not get him — or another star — proper subsequent to her in a superb romantic drama as an alternative of what Lopez might be seen doing right here, curling up on an enormous sofa mouthing Barbra Streisand’s traces in “The Approach We Have been”? Streisand’s heart-wrenched seriousness may very well be Lopez’s. She shares the creative self-determinism that Streisand embodies, however opts to deal with that energy like karaoke.
As a steward of her personal picture, Lopez won’t consider she has ever deserved reduction, stability, happiness, a shower. A striver with a “stressed coronary heart,” as she places it right here, is solely who she is. Making an attempt exhausting is what she is aware of. Essentially the most fascinating side of these newish Affleck Dunkin’ adverts — all proper, one of many fascinating facets — is that the Boston lunk he’s enjoying finds himself auditioning for her, doing his endearingly embarrassing greatest to make a superb musical impression. That man is aware of what Dr. Joe and the Celeb Zodiac don’t. Price and worthiness is likely to be Lopez’s love language.
The unhappy information is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as enjoyable — or humorous — as these commercials. This mission doesn’t appear to have introduced Lopez any nearer to serenity or levity. It’s an event for much more toil. Once more: She forged herself and a bunch of ladies to labor in a literal love manufacturing facility, and the circumstances are hazardous. Irrespective of how highly effective and playful Lopez appears on the reside stage — in Las Vegas or within the live performance scenes in her romantic comedy from two years in the past, “Marry Me,” or throughout her 2020 Tremendous Bowl halftime present with Shakira — she usually appears uncertain within the motion pictures, torn about how large or small, quiet or radiant to be. She appears pressured, possibly even neurotic. (She has additionally put her fictional self on a shrink’s sofa.) With a reside performer, you need unquenchable. You’re paying for Class 5 Pressure of Nature. However an actor wants no less than just a few scenes of plausible relaxation, and onscreen, she will not often, reliably find peace.
