Armond White writes for National Review Online about one of the worst ads during the recent concluded election campaign.
Actress Julia Roberts has clarified the class war. Negative response to her ad endorsing Kamala Harris has been greater than the reaction to any of her largely ignored recent movies. …
… Call it “Your Turn, Honey,” which is the opening line of the 40-second political spot in which Roberts narrates the story of a wife not divulging her presidential-election vote to her husband. It contrasts with 57-year-old Roberts’s rom-com filmography (Pretty Woman, My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, Conspiracy Theory), supposedly a career all about trust and fidelity. Whatever following Roberts has secured, the actress can no longer be trusted. The treacherous “Your Turn, Honey” plants seeds of mistrust, enmity, and home-wrecking marital division. …
… Roberts sets the premise: “In the one place in America where women still have the right to choose . . . ” We see a Roberts look-alike enter a polling place and exchange secretive glances with another white woman in an opposite carrel. Roberts continues, “You can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” A woman’s hand skims past the Trump-Vance Republican slot to fill in the Harris-Walz Democratic circle on a ballot. Next, the husband, who wears a masculine-microaggression baseball hat smirks, “Did you make the right choice?” The wife grins and replies, “Sure did, honey.” …
… No scene from a marriage by Ingmar Bergman or August Strindberg was more cynical. Leave it to Julia Roberts to destroy any semblance of marital compatibility this millennium. A bigger takeaway here is how a celebrity of Roberts’s status (she was the first actress paid $20 million for a single film role, in Erin Brockovich) presumes to lecture her audience; she sets a condescending public example. No longer inspiring romance, she inspires deceit. “Your Turn, Honey” is unbearably patronizing.