‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’ Hits Different Now That Jennifer Lopez Has Filed For Divorce From Ben Affleck

The last time that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck broke up, they were left with a couple of very public relationship souvenirs in the form of Gigli, the notorious bomb that kick-started their relationship, and Jersey Girl, a Kevin Smith movie where Lopez’s role was severely reduced following the Gigli flop. For the 2024 edition of the Lopez/Affleck break-up, there are no accompanying fiction films. Lopez has been making Netflix movies like The Mother and Atlas, while Affleck recently directed and co-starred in Air, and has been filming next year’s sequel to The Accountant.

But two interrelated Lopez/Affleck projects are out there and available to stream on Amazon Prime Video: Lopez’s feature-length accompaniment to her album This Is Me… Now, itself sort of a sequel to her record This Is Me… Then, which was dedicated to Affleck back in 2002; and The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a documentary detailing the making of the new film. Both the album and its visual accompaniment were inspired by Lopez’s reunion with Affleck – which makes all of this material surrounding them both instantly dated and perhaps more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

As a documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told suffers from some problems endemic to the 21st-century celeb-authorized doc, where even the rawest moments carry more than a hint of calculation. We’re told a lot about Lopez using this album and movie to express her authentic, true self with impunity, but there’s almost no mention of what, specifically, she’s attempting to express, beyond the vague idea that she’s been unlucky in love for the 20 years in between her Affleck relationships. You get the feeling that just seeing Lopez tear up or, in a few scenes, sit around without full makeup, is supposed to constitute something confessional in its honesty. But the movie barely discusses her actual music, beyond the fact that Lopez really likes making it. While it’s not a behind-the-scenes documentary’s job to “explain” the music at hand, there does seem to be a presumption of familiarity with her new batch of songs – even as Lopez admits, with charming self-deprecation, that she’s not exactly Taylor Swift: “It’s not like anyone was clamoring for the next J-Lo record,” she says by way of explaining that this project is for her.

Lopez winds up fronting the money for the project herself after some unnamed company yanks an offer from the table. (Netflix seems like a good guess, considering she did a couple of action movies and a halftime-show doc with them.) As such, the most interesting aspects of the movie are the levels of minutiae that go into the making of an expensive feature-length music video (which Lopez’s associates repeatedly stress is not a music video) – weighing in matters like which texture of fake mud is preferable, what precise style of umbrella to use for a Singin’ in the Rain homage, and, say, small-talk with Jane Fonda, where she casually discusses seeing photos of Affleck looking “beleaguered,” as Lopez puts it, at the Grammys. There’s also a funny moment where Affleck goes over Lopez’s script and teases her about her recent movie-career habit of shaving years off her actual age: “I love that you want to play younger even in the autobiographical [version]…”

That’s the other big, and more obvious, draw to this doc now that Lopez has filed for divorce: The collection of bits and pieces that the cameras catch of the affectionate but sometimes uneasy union between Lopez and Affleck. Lopez’s tumultuous past can be elided or generalized as all-purpose struggle, but her then-current relationship can’t stay so opaque, even if Affleck would clearly prefer it that way.

Affleck is interviewed on-camera, and also conducts a few interviews with Lopez for the movie, so he clearly understands that he’ll be involved, but he describes the process as something of a compromise between his earlier trouble with the scrutiny their relationship received. More than halfway through, Affleck compares Lopez’s drive for multi-platform success to his own alcoholism (in that it speaks to an intense need that can’t necessarily be fulfilled). Towards the end of the film, he admits: “I don’t really love being in the making-of documentary about my personal life, which is why I’m so relieved that … I was worrying for no reason. The movie wasn’t about me. It was about the ability to love yourself.” That eventual arc is part of Lopez’s managed vulnerability, a relatable but also, in in its own way, unknowable goal for her to attain that doesn’t require much specificity.

In a way, Lopez is right to keep a lot of details off screen and out of her songs – not just to appease Affleck, but because it’s easy to project ideas of a public relationship onto the smallest shards of evidence, nevermind a 90-minute behind-the-scenes glimpse at a shared creative life. The folly of The Greatest Love Story Never Told isn’t that it pays tribute to a relationship that has since dramatically shifted. Rather, it’s Lopez’s fixation (and certainly, not hers alone) on a heightened superstar form of crypto-memoir, where creative work is supposed to have the intensity of a tell-all and the remove of an A-list celebrity. It’s as if she’s forgotten the myriad ways actors or singers can express vulnerability without playing versions of themselves. She’s done this on film before, in movies like Out Of Sight or Hustlers. Maybe with this last phase of work switching abruptly to a time capsule, she can find her way back there again.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.