Upgraded
When I first saw Upgraded on Amazon Prime, my initial reaction was excitement Camila Mendes in a leading role that’s not high school themed! The 29 year old Riverdale alum (who’s so game for whatever batshit curveball that show throws her) and Netflix romp Do Revenge standout is a veteran at commanding the screen as a bitchy, beautiful, secretly vulnerable teen queen. In Upgraded (from actor turned director Carlson Young), she finally gets the chance to act her age or at least the age of a scrappy third tier assistant with an art history master’s degree, who gets in way over her head and also charms everyone around her.
Like many a teen show to feature upgrade before it, this would have been a mid-budget studio bet in the 2000s and now goes straight to streaming, with an air of disposability and clear, better antecedents most obviously The Devil Wears Prada. Like Anne Hathaway’s Andi, Ana is an ambitious twentysomething in New York with limited funds and serious aspirations, stuck doing unserious work in the name of luxury. An expert on fine art (which ought to be its own kind of luxury), she’s in a training program for an upscale auction house and trying to catch a break lest she run out of money and be forced to “return to Tampa and sell paintings of boats to senior citizens,” as she puts it. She’s an unwelcome futon crasher in the one bedroom apartment shared by her sister Vivian (Aimee Carrero) and fiancé Ronnie (Andrew Schulz) two people who speak loudly and don’t understand art, because working class.
But those are just the easy bits of tonal whiplash that Upgraded throws your way. Directed by Christine Lenig from a script credited to Justin Matthews & Luke Spencer Roberts & Christine Lenig herself, it seems at first to be going for a parody of the art world, particularly in the form of Ana’s boss Claire (Marisa Tomei), essentially an off brand Miranda Priestley with an implacable, jarring accent. (Ana’s friend Amy Derry Girls’ Saoirse Monica Jackson peculates it’s a cover for being from Minnetonka.) To say that Ana is an archetypical toxic boss is not quite right, she’s too well dressed and articulate for someone who has not figured out that they should no longer be mean to their employees. She is a couture dressed terrorizer but also a low-stakes bully a figure still glorified in low paying prestige work that’s an ill fit in the year 2024 and a hard redemption arc to buy. This woman will publicly humiliate you for leaving your lunch leftovers in her top desk drawer and then have the audacity to pit two low ranking assistants against each other for who gets to keep half day Friday privileges.
So it goes that through some convenient mishap, Claire steamrolls Ana into a London work trip to extra-assist her Mean Barbie assistants du jour Suzette (Rachel Matthews) and Renee (Fola Evans Akingbola) on some major auction deal or another. Relegated to a later flight in economy, Ana again charms upward into a first-class seat next to Will Delaroche (Archie Renaux), the dishy son of bohemian chic heiress Catherine (Lena Olin, striking the right note of narcissistic yet fun socialite), whose late Russian oligarch husband’s art collection New York art director at the company where Catherine is planning to auction. Same rhythm as last year’s Love at First Sight, but with more work talk.
At 104 minutes, Upgraded is the right length for this type of escapist, smooth brained fare yet still feels unwieldy, lurching between the cartoonishly ludicrous fine art world and a lived in, genuinely biting flirtation in the world of real people who drink and tease. (At least Ana swears profusely, like a real assistant.) Mendes is as convincing as someone who played Veronica Lodge could be at acting the perpetually bullied third assistant, but it’s a relief whenever she leaves the office and banters with Catherine or, preferably, Will, who Renaux ably plays as the platonic ideal of a rich London boy with Jude Law in The Holiday esque charm.
With the assurance of the romcom formula and some real earthiness to Mendes and Renaux’s performances, it’s not hard to skim over bits of laziness Ana waking up at 7.30 am and going straight to the airport yet having an overnight flight to London, Ana demonstrating her preternatural art smarts by recognizing the value of Renoirs and Cézannes and some choppy direction. In terms of glorifying toxic bosses in rarefied London spaces, Upgraded is less serious (and more successful) than Bradley Cooper’s 2015 haute cuisine mess Burnt. It has more pretensions and makes slightly more sense, than Emily in Paris. In true streaming economy form, it’s a smooth, ambient operator, made more memorable than it should be by a still underappreciated Mendes, who will hopefully upgrade to more headlining adults roles sooner rather than later.
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