Betty & Mary: The Birth of a Brilliant Friendship

America Young’s Betty & Mary, written by Dana Lyn Baron, compresses a mountain of the womanhood experience into the space of a bathroom and twelve minutes. By turns bittersweet and feel-good (and very funny), the plot revolves around two women at different points on the aging and useability scale while they learn to look beyond the logic of winning. 

In the bathroom mirror, middle-aged actor Betty (Baron) prepares for a role beneath her. Frustration and contempt slip into the line—asking someone if they want a coffee—with the slight pretense that those feelings are directed at the scriptwriter alone and not also at herself. But worse things await, more proof that this woman who should be convenient and accept her obsolescence actually wants to still keep living and thriving. The mortification of being seen demands the palliative of irony blown up to theatricality. And so, Betty & Mary is a comedy. 

On the niceness scale, the pair are on opposite ends. Betty’s honesty is blunt, the extension of her awareness that as far as the world is concerned, time is running out for her. Mary (Tally McCormack) is full of platitudes, and ironically, a little tone-deaf. 

But in her own dishonest way, Mary begins to care, which is what makes their developing relationship worthwhile. It is also her dishonesty, a mask for her less polite thoughts that sometimes does not stay on as well as she would like, that the narrative farms with delight for its laughs. Watch as she paints over her competitiveness with geniality, or as she struggles to sugarcoat her ageism even as she helps her “old, decrepit” colleague through a miscarriage. 

The film uses Betty’s miscarriage to hone in on its themes, particularly comedy. As the unlikely subject of humour, it brings out the more extravagant tones of the narrative. Betty and Mary break into Macbeth quotes, chronology flushed down the toilet. The camera goes into an exaggerated high angle, the score becomes tense, and all of the dramatic devices unite to suffuse a tragedy with irony and humour. Baron plays the moment with a precise grandiosity that still leaves room to remember that it is in fact a heavy loss for Betty. 

Around the halfway point, the tone shifts again. One allows for vulnerability, the other reaches for honesty by expressing revulsion. It is the true beginning of a friendship and yet there is no cloying line or look to spoil the tangy sweetness. 

Sincerity finally finds room between them. Mary goes from reassurances of continued fuckability to the optimism of yet to be dead. The mirror no longer shows Betty the most contemptible of them all, only a person who is assured of care and therefore, worth. 

Watch Betty & Mary: The Actors Prepare Short Film Trailer