While, at face value, Like A Boss (directed by Miguel Arteta, who slightly damages his street cred with this movie after offerings like Beatriz at Dinner [also starring Salma Hayek] and Duck Butter) might come across as a “female empowerment” movie centered on the conquering nature of lifelong friendship between two women, this theory quickly unravels at the seams around act two. It is at this point that our carrot-tinged antagonist, Claire Luna (Hayek), makes it abundantly clear that she will be offering absolutely no redeeming qualities or emotional depth.
With the tagline, “The world of beauty is about to get ugly” (which, speaking to the relevance of Silvio Horta’s recent suicide, might just as well have been applied to Ugly Betty), Like A Boss seems to take aim at women who have ascended “ruthlessly” (just another word for normally when a man does it) to the top of a business empire. In this case, Claire is the underdeveloped corporate villain, who has no real justification for being so hard-hearted and envious toward Mia Carter (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel Paige (Rose Byrne), two best friends who long ago started a slightly less impressive in sales makeup company called Mel&Mia, other than being inherently jealous of their collaborative nature and laid-back spirit. Because women who aren’t as successful in business are naturally more approachable, more “big-hearted,” Like A Boss not so latently underscores.
It feels telling that the script was co-written by Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly, who seem to be, at the very least, subconsciously poking fun at themselves for the fact that they’re writing about a subject matter that is decidedly feminine by introducing the goonish sub-villains of Ron (Jimmy O. Yang) and Greg (Ryan Hansen), co-owners of a makeup company called Get Some, which takes a no holds barred, douchebag approach to marketing with the phrase, “Look Hot, Get Some.” After all, they tell Mel and Mia, the only reason a woman wants to look good is for men, and there’s no shame in that–even if they’re “supposed to” be acting more modern, the truth remains, they claim, as old as time: women live to please men.
Mel, being the more repressed of the duo, is as usual, the one to bite her tongue when Claire informs them that she’s deciding between Get Some and Mel&Mia’s in terms of which “satellite” company to present at her upcoming beauty launch in six weeks. Mia, on the other hand, is less and less thrilled about this quote unquote merger that has left Claire with a frightening amount of power over them. Yet what choice did Mel have when their enterprise had gotten them into roughly five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of debt? Claire felt like an “opportunity,” a “savior.” But as the trope of powerful women dictates, Claire must pretty much immediately turn out to be a conniving bitch only in it for herself. She has no interest in Mel&Mia’s product, other than the fact that they have one bestseller that she wants to absorb within her own Oviedo brand (which has a font and word appearance that looks remarkably like Shiseido).
And as she pressures Mel and Mia for new ideas on the spot (something that endlessly vexes Mia, who needs weed and time to create), she accuses them of being only as good as their last great product, which doesn’t speak highly of their abilities. Considering that the Atlanta-based Mel&Mia store only houses two employees, Barrett (Billy Porter) and Sydney (Jennifer Coolidge), it also comes as a shock when Claire abruptly tells them to fire the former, now that she’ll be mass producing their products and doesn’t need a “quaint” system of hand-mixing to do it.
As usual, Mel has trouble being the one to deal with uncomfortable confrontation, placing the burden of putting one of their closest friends out to pasture squarely on Mia’s shoulders. True to form, however, their old married couple dynamic leads them to squabble over Mel’s cowardice after breaking the news to Barrett during an overtly forced lunch, deflecting from his own emotions regarding the upset. In a classic Billy Porter moment, he snaps at them to deliver the line, “Witness my tragic moment,” before dramatically walking out of the restaurant with fire and sadness in his eyes.
The only person sadder over his job loss, in fact, is Sydney, who explains to Mel and Mia that, like the two of them are for each other, Billy was “her person.” This is a concept that crops up time and time again throughout the movie, culminating in the solution to how they come up with another groundbreaking new product called Ride or Die. For, just as it has been iterated in the likes of Thelma and Louise, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Broad City, it is always platonic friendship that endures longer than any so-called “great love.” The greatest love so often being that which is shared between best friends. So perhaps this is why Claire is such a cold-hearted, plastic cuntrag. She lost her person long ago when she sold her down the river for success. Because yes, just like Mel and Mia, she started out with a partner who was her best friend. Except, unlike Mel and Mia, she seems utterly convinced that financial prosperity as a woman can only be achieved alone. And there are no moments of vulnerability that would lead us to believe she feels otherwise or that it is, indeed, lonely at the top. Even Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in The Devil Wears Prada was given a moment of tenderness, a back story to “explain” why she’s, well, a bitch.
Maybe, in some ways, Like A Boss could be viewed as progressive with this character rendering when taking into account that male CEOs and corporate businessmen never need a “reason” to be assholes. They simply are because they can be. And no one is going to think twice about it. When viewed through this lens, Claire is completely viable as a two-dimensional villain. Yet it’s something that just doesn’t hold water (no female-oriented pregnancy pun intended) when most people are all too aware that women have far too many emotional complexities to be labeled merely “good” or “evil” (though, in previous centuries this was all it took to make certain women into cautionary tales–hence the film noir femme fatale). Like A Boss had a rare opportunity to present audiences with a more depth-laden female villain (something that at least the first installment of Maleficent did). And, considering how the present feigns being all about “evolved” and “woke” perspectives, it would have even made more sense for Mel and Mia to forgive Claire at the end, or for Claire to be forgiven by her former best friend and business partner, Shea (Lisa Kudrow, whose cameo harkens back to that aforementioned Romy and Michele reference). Even another Jennifer Coolidge-featuring movie, Legally Blonde, saw Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) forgiving her arch nemesis, Vivian Kensington (Selma Blair), by the end. But perhaps it still behooves men to paint women as too petty to be in control of anything without creating piles of needless drama. Like ominously carrying a golf club around as a manufactured “character quirk” and smashing a vase arbitrarily to make a point about being “fiercssst.”
Alas, the only thing fierce about this movie is Billy Porter. And that a man (still a man regardless of being straight or not) stands out as being more interesting and multi-dimensional in a “female film” about the beauty industry does not quite bode well for one of the first major movies to be released in 2020.
