SCRAMBLED - Mark Reviews Movies

Scrambled, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 1, 2024

Nellie (Leah McKendrick) is in her mid-30s, single, making measly money selling handmade jewelry online, a perennial attendant at friends' bridal parties and weddings and baby showers, and very much in a rut. Every one of her friends seems to have it more together than her, and it's not as if she doesn't want to marry the right guy and maybe have a kid or two someday. It's just not going to be today or tomorrow, for sure, and if it's in a year or two or more, that's fine.

Scrambled throws a little wrench into Nellie's non-specific pseudo-plan, which definitely isn't what she needs at this moment of so much doubt and uncertainty. Her ovaries are showing signs of early degeneration, so biology might be against her. What's a woman with no romantic prospects, no immediate desire to have a baby, and at least some idea that she wants to be mother one day to do?

The only answer, as she sees it, is to freeze some of her eggs, so that they're waiting for Nellie whenever, if ever, the time is right. It's no simple task.

This film, written and directed by McKendrick, is bluntly honest about a lot of things, but its most admirable truth is how it gives us a character with an assortment of issues, watches her struggle through them, and doesn't provide her with an easy answer or some simple revelation that turns everything around for her. Nellie is who she is at the start of the film, and she's pretty much the same person by the end of it, only with some more experience and appreciation for everything she has to go through in order to keep her seemingly trackless life on the broad path it has been on for a while now.

A more routine story might give Nellie some clear goal outside of herself, such as some kind of clear biological deadline, a job opportunity that could solve her financial problems and help pay for her medical decision, or maybe a guy or two who might appear to be the elusive "one." McKendrick actively refuses to even hint at some kind of lifeline for or solution to this story (save for the one that allows her to pay for the procedure and, technically, isn't much of one, considering the established terms of the agreement). This is Nellie's story, her choice, and her complications to deal with as a result, and the film lets her be who she is over the course of it with no apologies.

It's refreshing on that level, and by way of McKendrick's particular outlook on things, the material is quite funny, too. All of it is based within the needs, desires, and eccentricities of this character, whom the filmmaker/star seems to know and understand on some authentic level. We believe the character, so it's quite easy to sympathize with Nellie's difficult struggle to find a means to keep waiting for when or if the right time comes.

Despite the elaborate medical procedure at the heart of the plot, most of this story is relatively relaxed. It's more a slice-of-life comedy than anything else, as Nellie serves as a bridesmaid for her best friend Sheila (Ego Nwodim), who gets cold feet before the ceremony but is talked down by her pal (after the bride reveals she's pregnant), and receives some tough talk from another wedding guest about the possible perils and wearisome life of starting a family in one's 40s. It's enough for Nellie to visit a fertility doctor, who gives her the news about her condition, and to decide to freeze some of her eggs.

In between the regular and painful injections of various hormones and drugs, Nellie just continues with her life, and the string of relatively everyday scenes is full of comedic potential. There's her family, made up of her supportive mother (played by Laura Cerón) and her stubbornly insensitive father (played by Clancy Brown) and older brother Jesse (Andrew Santino), and how the whole clan is still reeling from Nellie's break-up with a guy who seemed to be the one (Jesse also loans his sister the money for the procedure but expects to be repaid with interest, adding to her debt).

There are assorted gatherings for baby showers and engagement parties, where no one except Sheila can quite understand why Nellie doesn't just find a man and start a family with him. McKendrick's screenplay is as smart in creating convincingly awkward scenario as it is in forming the knowingly sarcastic, self-effacing tone of Nellie's character.

That's especially true of the third most prominent bit has Nellie reuniting with ex-boyfriends, thinking that maybe she misjudged them or that at least one of them has changed for the better. The strategy goes about how one would expect, but the degree to which these guys haven't changed—or become worse in their undesirable qualities—is a fine running gag.

McKendrick's script makes all of these episodes feel like a whole, even if they are just a series of fine jokes, and her performance ultimately gets at something deeper than the uncertainty and cynicism on the character's surface. The same can't quite be said of the final act of Scrambled, which works a little too hard to reach a degree of poignancy the film's comedic tone evades. It almost seems unfair, though, to complain about a string of forced, final-stretch scenes of heart-to-heart conversations when there's clearly so much sincerity driving them. The film earns them, in other words. It just earns the comedy better.

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