Alison Brie gets creepy, wrecks lives as ex-girlfriend in twisted rom-com
“Somebody I Used to Know” comes dangerously close to being interesting. It’s a romantic comedy, but it’s almost a twisted drama about a seriously damaged creep who goes back to her hometown and starts wrecking people’s lives.
Alison Brie plays the almost-creep in question, and you can practically feel the inner tension of an actress who really wants to play someone awful but has to back off — because of the conventions of romantic comedy, because the lead character must always be nice, and for a whole bunch of other not very good reasons.
But she could have gone there, with a little help from the script — which she wrote, along with her husband, Palo Alto native Dave Franco, who also directed. Brie can play prickly, selfish and scheming onscreen. Here, she could have taken the next step and played sick and evil.
She begins the movie as a nervous wreck. Ally (Brie) is in a nasty bind in her professional life. Once an aspiring documentarian, she is the showrunner for a ridiculous reality show. She hates it, but it’s also her entire identity, so she fears losing what she can’t stand.
When her show is canceled, she regroups by going back to where she grew up, a perfectly nice little community that the movie defines, with unconscious coastal elitism, as the death of ambition. Over and over, we’re reminded:
This is the place you stay if you want to make absolutely sure your life amounts to nothing.
On her first day back, Ally runs into her old boyfriend, Sean (Jay Ellis). Within the first two minutes, she’s flirting with him. Soon, later, when she finds out that he’s to be married that weekend, she gets herself invited to the wedding and then sets about getting him back, undermining the bride and wrecking the wedding.
Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t commit fully in any of those directions. She wants him back, but subtly. She wants to undermine the bride, but she identifies with the bride, and she tries to wreck the wedding, but half-heartedly. Franco and Brie’s goal seems to have been to keep Ally’s behavior just within the bounds of what the audience might consider acceptable.
The title refers to what Ally sees in the would-be bride, Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons), who turns out to be a lot more formidable than she or the audience expects. There’s potential in that, but that’s also lost. There’s nothing nice about Cassidy; she’s as cold and paranoid as Ally. In a flat-out war, they would be evenly matched.
But no, very soon we’re hearing Ally talking about how wonderful and amazing Cassidy is — but what’s so wonderful about her? We see Cassidy singing with her band, but the band sounds lousy, and the song is moronic. She’s an unpleasant person and a so-so singer, and yet, at a certain point, everybody starts pretending she’s great, and the movie tanks.
Still, there are moments in Ellis’ performance that suggests a passive nice guy caught between two self-absorbed, ego-monster women, whose life is all but guaranteed to be a living hell. The only question is whether the hell will be called Cassidy or Ally. And that is interesting.