Julia Roberts, Home-Wrecker, Nation-Destroyer

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, including the odious Obama production Leave the World Behind.

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.

That wouldn’t be news in a Michael Haneke or Paul Verhoeven Eurotrash satire, but it is shockingly cynical from Roberts, raising suspicion that the Harris campaign’s last-minute slogan, “A New Way Forward,” actually promotes marital faithlessness, betrayal, and nation-wrecking disloyalty.

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.” Then Roberts emphasizes, “Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.” The two women eye-check each other and pat the “I voted” stickers on their breasts.

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.

Think back to Roberts’s other questionable career choices: Her skittish interracial thriller The Pelican Brief that strenuously avoided a kiss between America’s white sweetheart and black co-star Denzel Washington — a summation of liberal racism. And her perverse-Cinderella film Pretty Woman from 1990, the forerunner to this year’s nihilist Anora.

Fans might wonder about Roberts’s motives. This is the major question of Millennial politics that makes filmgoers uncomfortably aware of just how much their screen idols are unlike them. The ad’s scenario sneaks in feminist solidarity to promote what is actually female separatism. Roberts must assume that her divisive message is acceptable to the masses who got vicarious pleasure from her movies. Yet, it’s the most clearly hostile example of celebrity conceit since Robert De Niro’s last anti-Trump tantrum.

The industry-wide presumption that celebrities are entitled to voice their political preferences has ruined film culture. Instead of endowing their individual vote with the sanctity of privacy, they set off on a bizarre rush to make their predilections public. (Roberts’s Pretty Woman client, Richard Gere, made a last-minute Harris pitch.) Comedian Ricky Gervais rushed to answer the mania with last weekend’s satirical TikTok post that ridiculed this hypocrisy. Posing as a “wellness and beauty influencer,” Gervais spoofed media idiocy: “As a celebrity, I know all about stuff. Like science and politics. So trust me when I tell you who you should vote for. If you don’t vote the right way, it’s like a hate crime. And it makes me sad and angry, and I’ll leave the country, and you don’t want that.”

Gervais gave relief from celebrity self-importance, accompanied by photos of red-handed celebrity mischief: Diddy and J-Lo, Diddy and Beyoncé, Whoopi, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, George Clooney, Eminem, De Niro, Cardi B, Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Madonna, and more, seen in a backdrop montage.

So Roberts isn’t Hollywood’s only arrogant millionaire. As elites, celebs ignore the invasion, murders, rapes, inflation, and mendacity (congressional bills described in language that is the opposite of their content) to boast their indifference to common suffering, usually while pretending concern for the underclass. Left-wing stars destroy their own goodwill. Harrison Ford followed Roberts’s shameless partisanship, ruining affection for the most memorable line of his career, “Get off my plane” in Air Force One, which gave all Americans a sense of shared patriotism. (Ford’s “I’ve never been to a shunning” from Hollywood Homicide comes second. It proves that actors don’t know anything. Their respect for the republic is warped by naïve socialist sympathies, but smart perspectives can be put in their mouths.)

As Elon Musk observed, “Even if everyone in music and entertainment endorses the Kamala puppet, it won’t matter. The public sees through it.” And what they see through is the class war that celebrities wage against the hoi polloi, using fame, fake smiles, phony friendliness, unapproachable sex, and wealth. (Robert Altman saw through it when casting box-office stars Roberts and Bruce Willis as the epitome of Hollywood’s false heroism in The Player.)

“Your Turn, Honey” was financed by Doug Pagitt’s Vote Common Good, a 501 nonprofit that “aims to move at least some religious voters away from conservatism.” Vote Common Good works in coordination with such groups as the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump PAC that endorsed Biden in 2020 and endorsed Harris this year. Although no faith-based signs appear in the ad, it seems to approve any bad behavior that progressives will commit and condone to serve their political interests. Roberts not only encourages dishonesty in personal relationships, she wants it to occur across the nation as part of our social actions and in our public institutions. When you realize how stupid and destructive these celebrities can be, it’s enough to make you never want to see another Julia Roberts movie.

Calling in to Fox & Friends, Trump responded, “I’m so disappointed at Julia Roberts. She’s going to look back on that and she’s going to cringe, ‘Did I really say that?’ It doesn’t say much for her relationship, but I’m sure she has a great relationship.”

But maybe not so great a relationship with the public. She has alienated herself. The advice Roberts implies in “Your Turn, Honey” is not just anti-American, it’s anti-romantic.