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In 1899, Georges Méliès released a series of short films that condensed the Dreyfus Affair into 13 minutes. Now the Disney+ documentary Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story contrives to take 10 times as long to cover a celebrity trial about leaked Instagram posts.
For those who missed last year’s High Court case, or the Channel 4 dramatisation, or the West End adaptation, the whole unedifying saga revolved around Rooney (wife of former England captain Wayne Rooney) devising a shrewd, Miss Marple-esque trap to seemingly identify Rebekah Vardy (wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy) as the person selling her private Instagram photos to The Sun newspaper. The allegations were denied by Vardy, leading to a public feud and a libel lawsuit which Vardy lost.
So now for a flimsy three-part series in which Rooney gets to give her first-hand account of the tale and, in doing so, finally “move on”. The show could’ve been a breezy retelling of an ingenious Insta-era investigation and a punchy rebuke to the media’s obsession with the private lives of the famous. Instead it is a laborious attempt to wring everything and anything out of this vaguely diverting moment in pop culture. “It was never reported as a serious matter,” Rooney contends, but the truth is that the more it is earnestly analysed, the more trivial it appears.
By the time you enter the third hour of social media parsing, digressions about the Rooneys’ marriage and interviews with agents, tabloid hacks and lawyers, the recent Beckham documentary begins to seem like a work of Proustian ambition by comparison. But Rooney is at least more engaging than her husband. And it’s hard not to sympathise with her grievances about the prying press and paparazzi that have hounded her since she was a teen.
She is, however, either wilfully naive or disingenuous when she describes her surprise at how her public naming and shaming of Vardy led to widespread attention and online abuse for the alleged leaker. Vardy, incidentally, doesn’t appear. No doubt we’ll be back here soon enough talking about her very own tell-all series.
★★☆☆☆
On Disney+ now
