Welcome to ‘Showtime with Emily Maddick’, in which GLAMOUR’S Assistant Editor and Entertainment Director brings a unique perspective to the month’s most hyped film or TV show. For September’s instalment, Emily takes on Disney+’s new film, Swiped, the biopic of tech giant, Whitney Wolfe Herd, co-founder of Tinder, who went on to create the feminist dating app, Bumble. Emily, who worked with Whitney as a consultant at the height of the ‘Girlboss feminism’ era, argues that while the film has been criticised for portraying a sanatised version of events, it also reveals Whitney to be a kind, compassionate and game-changing leader, who wasn’t afraid to show weakness and vulnerability. And this, Emily says, is an accurate portrayal of the woman she got to know.

Swiped – the new Disney+ biopic starring Lily James portraying the rise and fall and rise again of dating app mogul, Whitney Wolfe Herd – once the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet – has not had the greatest of reviews. It’s been described as ‘corny’ ‘hagiographic’ and ‘lacking in substance’, or as Variety puts it:

“Wolfe’s particular genius seems to have been for marketing. Maybe it’s appropriate that a movie about her plays like a marketing exercise: simplified, sanitised, suspect.”

I agree, to some extent, with all of this. Watching the film does feel like you’re being fed a one-sided, washed down, sugar-coated version of an origin story that was perhaps a lot more complex, nuanced and grubby. David Fincher’s Oscar-winning The Social Network, this is not. Although there are clear parallels between the two plots about the rise of Facebook and the rise of Tinder and Bumble.

In fact, one excellent review on Slant directly compares the two and raises some important holes in the handling of the original material.

“Swiped’s story sits right at the center of so many vital issues, and a smarter, braver rendition of it—that is, one interested in actually probing beneath the surface of things—might have yielded a film truly worthy of comparison to The Social Network. Instead, we get a piece of corporate hagiography that sweeps all those issues aside to celebrate another tech billionaire.” Ouch.

Hilary Bronwyn Gayle