2 days ago
Given all we know, it's hard to see Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in love again
This week I watched two programmes, one which revealed the inevitable end of a marriage and another that captured the magical beginning. One of them was all talk of love and confidence in a happy future; the other full of sarcasm and filth. But I wonder if you're able to guess which way round? Now I've asked the question, you certainly should be.
The first was The Greatest Love Story Never Told (Amazon Prime), a documentary made by Jennifer Lopez about her romantic reunion with Ben Affleck. Or at least... Well, I'll start further back, in case you haven't been following this story over the decades.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck had a love affair from 2002 to 2004, becoming engaged and making a couple of awful films together, before mysteriously calling off the wedding at the last minute. J-Lo went on to marry the singer Marc Anthony (actually her third husband, as she'd married two other chaps before she met Ben Affleck) and had twins, while Ben Affleck married the actress Jennifer Garner and had three children, but both of those marriages hit the rocks, and in 2021 our heroes got back together, marrying in July 2022, two decades after their original betrothal. Romantic!!!!!!!
In 2024, Jennifer Lopez released her ninth studio album This Is Me... Now, all about their rekindled partnership 'with themes of love and self-healing'. She simultaneously released This Is Me... Now: A Love Story, a feature-length music and dance video as a companion piece to the album. And she also released The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the making of This Is Me... Now: A Love Story. It's a complicated triptych, isn't it? One has to salute the ambition of the punctuation marks alone.
Anyway, I have been intending to watch The Greatest Love Story Never Told for ages. I love Ben and J-Lo! Unfortunately, it took me so long to get round to it, they're now divorced. One really does have to move fast with these people.
It's a pretty difficult watch, knowing they're not together any more. Nevertheless, I think it would actually have been more difficult if they still were. The more they kiss and murmur on camera, the more speeches she gives and receives about love, the more obviously they're heading for the rocks.
One rumoured reason behind their original break-up was that Jennifer had a greater enthusiasm for media attention than the more secretive Ben. So how does it look the second time around? Well, as a wedding gift, we learn, he made her a special book of all the love letters they've ever exchanged (a touching gesture: the creation of something sacred and private amidst the blizzard of global publicity) and the documentary opens – it opens! – with him discovering that she's taken this book to the recording studio in order to draw on it for the album, with all her collaborators and bystanders looming over it and thumbing through. And remember, this documentary is intended by Jennifer as a happy glimpse of newlywed life!
It seems crazy to let this much light in on something as intimate as marriage – even Meghan Markle uses a pretend kitchen. But Meghan Markle is playing shop, trying to copy what the Kardashians do in the genre of 'reality' and what film stars do with their focus on 'privacy', both at the same time. J-Lo isn't playing shop. Her entire soul compels her to share herself with the public, at the expense of every personal relationship in her life.
Not to blame her unduly. Ben Affleck has a history of alcoholism, with many rehab stints and relapses under his belt; he doesn't look like a peach to marry either, and his previous wife seemed to have a pretty gruelling time. I don't really fault J-Lo's choices; her stardom is real. There is something glorious about her doomed attraction to the blistering light, something of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland: always performance above contentment. (I'm trying to find a way to avoid using the words 'No man can fill her hole', but I seem to have failed.)
The concluding lines of this film, over shots of Jennifer kissing and cuddling her new husband, are: 'When you take your last breath, you won't think about who did something wrong to you. You will think about those who loved you.' It's supposed to be a happy ending. Instead, we can't help projecting into a different, lonelier future, picturing that moment and those thoughts for Jennifer Lopez and being rather moved.
Meanwhile, No Activity (BBC iPlayer) is the series where a different couple of performers first met: Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, who went on to get married, co-write and co-star in the phenomenal Colin from Accounts. In this earlier series he plays an undercover cop on a stakeout, she's a colleague in the control room.
No flowery speeches of love in this earthy, sweary, low-plot Australian sitcom; more like intense debates about which hand you'd use to masturbate if you were a Siamese twin. Perhaps that's not your cup of tea. But you're watching two hugely likable, hugely talented people click together, their mutual sense of humour visibly crackling into life, and you know they'll go on to create a great comedy series, a happy marriage and family.
As he describes a date where he believes he's given her a magnificent climax due to his experience playing the clarinet, and she tells a friend that she'd just experienced a bout of diarrhoea and vomiting, I thought: this might be the most goddamn romantic thing I've ever seen.
