Billionaires Daughter, Nicola Peltz Beckham, Slammed For Making A 'Poverty Porn' Film

A movie steeped in ignorance will likely not affect Nicola Peltz Beckham s career but its messaging could potentially bolster unfair stereotypes about poverty.

Peltz Beckham, who is the daughter of billionaire businessman and investor Nelson Peltz  and daughter-in-law of power couple David and Victoria Beckham , is receiving criticism for her film, Lola.

The movie, which marks Peltz Beckhams writing and directorial debut as well as her first leading role, premiered in February with a limited theatrical and digital release. However, it is now garnering attention thanks to a scathing review published last week in The Guardian  by writer and filmmaker Kady Ruth Ashcraft, who described the film as a bad movie and poverty porn. 

Peltz Beckham did achieve something with Lola: its called poverty porn, Ashcraft wrote. And in film, that means the exploitation of the conditions of poverty for entertainment and artistic recognition.

She later added, What makes Lola such a flagrant example of poverty porn is just how careless the project feels in the context of Peltz Beckhams exceptionally lavish life.

HuffPost has reached out to Peltz Beckham for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

According to a plot synopsis on IMDb , Peltz Beckham plays the titular Lola, a poor 19-year-old woman who is trying to save enough money to get herself and her little brother, Arlo (Luke David Blumm), out of their mother Monas (Virginia Madsen) toxic home. Lola hopes to do this by working two jobs: at a drugstore with her best friend, Babina (Raven Goodwin), and dancing at a strip club.

Peltz Beckham previously told WWD  that she wrote the initial script for Lola six years ago over the course of three days. Based on Ashcrafts review of the film, it comes off like it was written without care, knowledge or even curiosity about the nuances of living as a poor person, with Ashcraft writing that Peltz Beckham cosplays a disadvantaged darling, dressed up in despair drag, in a film whose message about hardship could be summed up as pout your way out of poverty. 

Film critic Ayeen Forootan also criticized Lola in a review for the website In Review Online . Although Forootan praised the visual design of the film, he went on to say that it was a poorly scripted and stereotypically melodramatic story.

Ashcraft and Forootan werent the only film critics to pan Lola. In a review for Spectrum Culture , journalist Andrew Burton wrote that Peltz Beckhams lack of understanding about the realities of being poor is hard to ignore while watching the film.

Its not a law that directors making slice-of-life flicks must be personally familiar with the material they are depicting, but before even watching Lola, the disconnect between the dead-end world the film takes place in and Peltz Beckhams background stands out as jarring, Burton wrote. One cant help but feel that the project is doomed from the get-go because it is conceptually untenable.

If these reviews havent deterred you from wanting to watch Lola for yourself, the movie is available to watch on Apple TV+ and Prime Video.