A Sundance Audience Award-winning dramedy from the tenderfoot director/writer Paul Downs Colaizzo, with its self-explanatory title, BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON (about a girl Brittany who decides to run the annul NYC marathon for the first time) is your usual suspects of life-affirming, motivation-inspiring, slight syrupy, pastel-hued chick flick about a thirty-inching girl’s endeavor to jump-start her stalled life.

Like umpteen protagonists before, what makes Brittany (Bell) a tad different is that she is overweight, and her party-hard, Adderall-consuming days are running out their mileages, as under a doctor’s prescription, she needs to stay healthier, ergo, never a runner, her resolution is to train her self in less than one year time to finish a full marathon, but, hers must be a bumper road (otherwise, why bother making it into a movie? It is based on the factual story of Colaizzo’s roommate), Brittany must sever her previous lifestyle, forge new friendship with fellow runners and might or might not find her romantic soulmate along the way.

Setbacks creep in with a sweeping move, and only in the aftermath - before that she has never really opened up to anyone, impeded by her hypersensitivity and self-esteem which are intrinsically keyed into her weight and the image of appearance - Brittany needs to get back on her foot (a pep talk spurred by her brother-in-law Demetrius, play by an earnest Howery, is the clincher), and the good news is that NYC marathon is an annual event, hope springs eternal.

Bell luminously inhabits her character who has undergone an astonishing 40-pound weight loss, and seizes a rare leading role to express the frustration and under-appreciation as forever the fat, funny sidekick, Brittany can be bluntly mean, a point Colaizzo doesn’t pull punches, and Bell makes sure that we can relate to Brittany even when she is in the rock bottom, we can feel your pain, sister!

Judicious guidance is overly applied to the supporting cast, inclusivity is everything, Brittany’s new sweetheart is man-child Jern (Ambudkar) of Indian stock, they meet inside a posh house where they share the pet-sitting job (how incredible is that?), her roommate Gretchen is a glamor-seeking, catty Asian-American (Lee), her new fellow runners are the married gay man Seth (Stock) and Catherine (Watkins), a divorcé-to-be who is fighting for the custody of her kids, with much maternal care to spare, while the father-figure to her is the said African-American Demetrius.

Industriously dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of a positive-thinking message without being too sentimental and airy-fairy, and upscaling itself to an impeachable political correctiveness, BRITTANY…. is an exemplar on both parties, despite the similarities in almost every turn of the pages.

referential entries: Nisha Ganatra’s LATE NIGHT (2019, 6.4/10); Judd Apatow’s TRAINWRECK (2015, 5.5/10).