The Bennifer Doc Is Completely Unnecessary — But No One Is More Devoted to Press Than JLo
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There’s a moment in Jennifer Lopez’s latest documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, directed by Jason Bergh, where she gets to the heart of why she’s pursuing a multi-format rollout of her ninth album This Is Me … Now. “It’s not like anybody was clamoring for the next JLo record,” she says with a self-aware laugh in an interview scene. “There’s some people around me who are like, ‘This is stupid. She doesn’t need to do this. Why is she doing this?’ And they’re right. I don’t need to do any of it … But I want to.”
This is the crux of the film, which follows the making of both her album and its accompanying visual film. Lopez’s three-pronged project explores the rekindling of her relationship with Ben Affleck, who were together for a whirlwind, tabloid-beloved relationship from 2002-04, then rekindled their romance in early 2021 before ultimately marrying in 2022. Much of the music is inspired by a series of letters and emails they exchanged during their first run; Affleck had not only saved them but also compiled them into a book he gave her as a present when they got back together.
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“I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told,” Affleck tells the camera in the film. The documentary is named after the book he made for Lopez. “If you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.”
Affleck plays the role of the reluctantly supportive husband well. He breathes a sigh of relief when the filming of her musical ends, thrilled that the story is more about his wife learning to love herself than about loving each other. But for every grumble, there’s a moment of his own willing negotiation of his privacy. He wouldn’t have made it down the aisle otherwise.
As the doc progresses, Lopez finds grander and grander ways to tell it. She’s spending much of her own money to finance the film, which satirizes her four marriages and constant pursuit of romantic love. Lopez struggles to get a cast together, specifically to play an astrology-themed Greek chorus who comment from above on Lopez’s trials and tribulations as our most notable hopeless romantic. In her eyes, the fellow A-listers turning her down are “scared” to take such a big risk. Her Monster-In-Law co-star Jane Fonda warns Lopez of letting her relationship get too overexposed again. Jenifer Lewis shows up on set and seems playfully baffled by what the hell she’s even filming. Lopez’s team becomes increasingly stern as they remind her that they are spending too much money on what is ultimately a passion project.
Like the musical film, the documentary is a silly, out-of-touch, over-the-top exercise that only a celebrity like Lopez could pursue. Affleck is a begrudging yet supportive figure throughout, keeping her in check when it seems like she’s going to claim she was younger than she actually was when they first met and at points when he is personally feeling overexposed. He still defends her and her creative pursuit ardently, noting his willingness to negotiate on how public their romance could be on social media and thoughtfully explains her Tinkerbell syndrome and hunger for an audience. He compares her addiction to being an entertainer to alcoholism: In the same way an alcoholic can’t drink enough liquor, Lopez can’t have enough followers. Like the extended music video surmises, Lopez’s search for love in all forms is born out of not feeling loved enough as a child. She learns this in a dream fictional JLo recounts to her therapist Fat Joe, where she encounters the childhood version of herself who begs the older JLo to love her more.
But for how completely unnecessary it all seems to be, it’s hard to look away. Bennifer are still are ultimate celebrity couple who have given the world the type of whirlwind, decades-spanning love story not even the best romance novelists could imitate. And what’s so compelling about Lopez is that she is the one committed to helping feed us the lore as much as possible. Whether she has Affleck rubbing sunscreen on her butt in the “Jenny From the Block” video, posting an Instagram hard launch of their reunion or showing off his private love letters in a documentary, no one has been more devoted to the coverage of Bennifer than JLo herself. She is their romance’s greatest reporter.
In an era of highly curated privacy, where most of our biggest stars have more often than not pulled an opaque curtain over their private lives, it’s refreshing to see when celebrities lean in to the celebrity of it all, like the very public courtship of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But few famous couples are a match for the self-mythologizing Bennifer have embarked on, and like Fonda says in the documentary, we’re all invested.
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