In 2021, when Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got back together after nearly 20 years, with four divorces between them (three of them hers, one his) and one A-Rod, it felt like a romantic destiny fulfilled; like something amiss in the universe had been put back together. Much like Jen and Ben, we realized we may not have been ready for their relationship in the early aughts — it was too bright, too prominent, too blingy. We didn’t understand that something so high profile and overexposed could be genuine. Two decades later, we’ve had other (para-social) relationships with celebrity couples and have learned a thing or two about how the tabloid coverage contributed to their 2004 breakup. (Bennifer 1.0 walked — nay dragged itself through broken glass — so Taylor and Travis could run.)
Now, thanks to time and wisdom, we love their love story! We’re even willing to reconsider their 2003 cinematic flop, Gigli, when it streams on the Criterion Channel next month. Call her a savvy businesswoman or a lovable narcissist, but J.Lo picked up on what the people wanted: to luxuriate in this moment with them; to get a glimpse of their relationship; to fully nestle into Bennifer 2.0; to know what they talk about in couples therapy. To satisfy our lovesick little minds, she gifted us This Is Me … Now: A Love Story, a movie-musical–autofiction–cum–album promotion that’s one part of a self-funded $20 million project (along with a behind-the-scenes documentary and an album) inspired by her two fixations: finding love and reconnecting with Ben Affleck. To tell her epic love story, she borrows from her own rom-com heyday, channeling a 2002 aesthetic, when music videos had interludes and plots and flip phones. She revisits fedoras and ballet flats and Burberry print to dance her way through TIM … N:ALS, a 55-minute feverish highlight reel that (sort of) tells (mostly hints at) the real story of how she found herself, learned how to love, and found her way back to Ben.
If there is anybody we should be able to trust with a love story, it’s Lopez; she’s been selling us on a woman’s quest for love for almost as long as she’s been on the road back to Affleck. And as one of the preeminent rom-com heroines of the early aughts, she has been a pro at getting us to believe she’s like the rest of us: a relatable human who bumbles and stumbles and charms as she allows herself to be humbled by the pursuit of a happy ending. Even though her complexion glows like 10,000 fireflies are lighting her from within, we can buy her as a no-nonsense hotel maid falling for a senatorial candidate or an anal-retentive wedding planner who falls for a man with a fiancée. For TIM … N:ALS, she returns to the Everywoman tool kit, pulling out all those relatable rom-com emotions (yearning, lonely, lovesick, disillusioned, dick-matized). In it, she’s not Jennifer Lopez, she’s the “Artist,†a lovelorn modern woman who goes to therapy and who is actually a vaguely fictionalized version of herself on a fictionalized version of her journey to finding “the one.†She moves through a series of connected, chronological vignettes that serve as mini-music videos. In one song, she parties too much; in another, she gets married three times in quick succession. Between each vignette, the plot is advanced through her therapy sessions with Fat Joe (looking great in various cardigans). She has to learn to trust in the universe, her horoscope (represented by a Greek chorus of ridiculous celebrity cameos playing different Zodiac signs who weigh in on what she’s doing wrong), and a guru. She has to do some inner-child work (yes, played by a child actor she must learn to embrace). And only once she arrives at self-love does she get her Ben (or her Ben’s chin — it’s an obscured cameo). Oh! I forgot; she also has to keep a machine going in the Heart Factory — a literal iron steampunk heart machine that beats, that is a metaphor of her own heart, I guess (?) — by feeding it rose petals. Then she gets her happy ending.
But in the end, we don’t really get ours. Because when it comes to Affleck, neither the film nor the companion documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, is willing to dive into the details of their relationship. In both, she tosses us a few Easter eggs: In one scene, the “Artist†longingly watches The Way We Were, a nod to J.Lo and Ben both loving that movie; and in the doc, we discover she occasionally calls Affleck papi. She prefers to stay in the clouds, making vague references to the grand gestures of love. The nonspecificity is meant to make her relatable. But we don’t really want the Everywoman bit anymore when she’s crying in the rain, in a silk gown, in front of an outdoor fireplace at some fabulous mansion. It’s gotten boring to have to pretend.
The companion doc, set to premiere at the end of the month, unintentionally offers a compelling arc for J.Lo, one that’s more revealing about her intentions than the mythical love story she thinks she’s telling. Take a story line featuring Jane Fonda, as she debates whether or not she even wants to be involved in TIM … N:ALS (Lopez and Fonda are former co-stars and also in the sisterhood of many high-profile divorces). It has nothing to do with her not liking the script or concern that she’s basically being cast in a very expensive improv skit. Fonda’s reluctance comes from the fact that she’s concerned about the way Lopez and Affleck are publicizing their relationship again. She doesn’t want to be part of something that opens Lopez up to more criticism. “I believe that everyone in the entire world is pulling for this relationship and this love. And the idea of how you present that is so sacrosanct, so important. It should be handled in a way that you aren’t overly flaunting it, so much so that it creates any form of criticism or resentment,†she explains to J.Lo via her longtime manager Benny Medina. In the end, love wins: Fonda plays Sagittarius alongside Post Malone (Leo) and Keke Palmer (Scorpio).
Fonda may be a killjoy, but she hits on something real. The project’s ultimate goal is to entertain us (and she dances for her life in this thing), but it’s to also reframe her story. Criticism and resentment are even more potent muses for Lopez than Affleck and Love. She wants us to understand, on a deep level, that her marriages and relationships weren’t something to make fun of or use for tabloid fodder; that they didn’t end just because she’s difficult but because she was a broken woman trying to fix herself; that no matter how big her career got, she always felt empty. She makes references to seeming powerful but feeling weak and cites times she “went to card readers†and followed “questionable roads†trying to figure out her romantic life. (Which roads? What kind of cards? We’ll never know.)
Over the course of the documentary, nobody is sure — even Lopez sometimes — that a self-funded megaproject is a good idea, especially after the initial funding fell through. Each time she reminds everyone (and herself) that she is trying to do something nobody else has ever done before with this project. (As if Lemonade isn’t right there!) But not only is love not original (even though it may feel that way to every person who’s ever fallen in love), Lopez has told us this story so many times before — in every rom-com, in her music, and, explicitly, in her 2014 memoir, True Love, where she chronicled, with tour photos, her journey to self-love, her struggle knowing her worth, and how she found herself again after her divorce from Marc Anthony. And now, again, this project. She’s been defined, and defined herself, with this story for so long even she must be sick of repeating herself.
There are two recentish moments that make me think Lopez is getting tired of telling this story, both professionally and personally. In one of her later rom-coms, 2022’s Marry Me, she plays another version of herself — a megastar musician who falls for a regular old schoolteacher played by Owen Wilson (rom-com or a horror movie about someone having to settle for “just a guy�). There’s a scene where she pulls her hair into a high pony, slaps on a bow and cutesy high-waisted shorts, like Sandy Liang styled her, and visits Wilson’s character in his Brooklyn apartment. She falls in love with his rental and his scruffy haircut and his simple, “folksy†life, as if she were someone 20 years younger who doesn’t own several mansions. I remember thinking she looked weary, as if she were sick of fulfilling the role of the woman who has to humble herself (commute from her penthouse to a rental in Red Hook) in order to win love. It rang untrue — like she had evolved past this stage. So did a moment in her documentary where, while filming TIM … N:ALS, she realizes she is missing Ben Affleck’s premiere for Air. She feels horrible and starts to spiral at the gym, tearing up on-camera, wondering if she could be a good partner or even a good mother if she was this dedicated to making her own movie. I’m sure the vulnerability was genuine, but it seemed beneath her. She’s no longer believable in the role of a woman learning to compromise to obtain love. The doc felt like the rom-com trope where we realize the heroine is pursuing the wrong love interest and the right guy has been there all along — in this scenario, the right guy is her dedication to her job, not her quest for love.
From now on, I only want J.Lo in roles that create a love story with her work. She plays a woman who got back together with the love of her life, married him in a Vegas wedding, and, once all of that was out of the way, found herself willing to skip his movie premiere, spend $20 million of her own money to make her own movie that nobody was sure should exist. She then spends sleepless nights obsessing over the consistency of the mud she has to dance in, even though it’s ridiculous to spend that much money on mud, and panics when she can’t get Derek Hough to say “yes†to a cameo (he later does). And in a plot twist, while she really likes said love of her life, she has no time for him to explain vintage cameras because she’s too busy in meetings, sitting in stony silence until someone approves her spending $200,000 of her own money to hire an actual guru for ten seconds of screen time. In the end, she doesn’t worry about compromise and gets her own happy ending. That’s the J.Lo rom-com heroine we all want — and I bet it will age better than Gigli.Â