Review: 'Sleeping With Other People' is rom-com's evil stepchild
Writer and director Leslye Headland clearly loves romantic comedies. It's why she can deconstruct the genre, then reconstruct it for her second film, Sleeping With Other People.
Writer and director Leslye Headland clearly loves romantic comedies. It's why she can deconstruct the genre, then reconstruct it for her second film, Sleeping With Other People.
Headland's first was Bachelorette, based on her play, a nasty, yet quite good, piece about female friendship that looked at bonding, jealousy, and cruelty among women.
Sleeping With Other People is, similarly, not easy to swallow, but that's the point, much as it was in Bachelorette. Still, it's oddly sweet, in its own off-kilter way.
Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey (Community's Alison Brie) are two supremely screwed-up people. In college, they lost their virginity to each other in a one-night stand. In the following decade-plus, they've become total disasters in relationships. Jake is a sweet-talking womanizer, while Lainey is obsessed with a college crush (Adam Scott), whose interest in her is only physical, even though he's engaged to someone else.
They meet after a meeting of a sex-addiction support group, and strike up a friendship. If they've ruined every sexual relationship they have ever been in, why destroy this one with physical complications? Two people who have never experienced healthy love start to fall for each other, even though they keep pretending they are not.
Headland clearly knows her way around the rom-com. She uses its tropes - the meet-cute, the will-they-or-won't-they, the questioning of whether men and women can be friends, the token best friends - all to her advantage. Jason Mantzoukas and Andrea Savage as Jake's married friends are great. Unlike their stock-character counterparts, they don't hate on each other or lament marriage; Mantzoukas' Xander does not live vicariously through Jake. They love being married to each other, though they remember a time when they, too, could take ecstasy and attend a child's birthday party, as Jake and Lainey do.
Headland refuses to redeem her characters, which is what makes Sleeping With Other People ultimately more interesting than other rom-coms. Jake doesn't spend the entire movie being a swine just to become a perfect mate in the end. Same with Lainey. Headland is particularly adept at highlighting the darkness in a genre known for light, and Lainey's pathology is deeply felt.
Sleeping With Other People is no When Harry Met Sally. Instead, it's that classic evil stepchild, just as Headland intended it to be.
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Sleeping With Other People *** (Out of four stars)
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Directed by Leslye Headland. With Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Jason Mantzoukas, Andrea Savage, Adam Scott. Distributed by IFC Films.
Running time: 1 hour, 41 mins.
Parent's guide: R (sexual content, language, drug use).
Playing at: Ritz East.EndText