A joint effort from wife-and-husband team Alison Brie and Dave Franco, the romantic comedy “Somebody I Used to Know” (on Amazon) takes a page from “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and probably more than one Hallmark movie: A woman attempts to disrupt pending nuptials so she can have the guy for herself.
I’m a big believer in tropes. If deployed right, they are a solid framework that can then be subverted in all kinds of interesting ways, which is what Brie and Franco have done here. She stars and he directs from a script they co-wrote together.
Brie plays a reality TV producer named Ally and the opening moments are savagely winking as a satire of the reality genre. Her show is called “Dessert Island” and it sounds like an unholy cross between “Top Chef,” “Cake Boss” and “Love Island” (I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to make flans). When competitors are booted, they’re told: “I’m sorry chef, you have been dessert-ted.”
Surprise, the show gets canceled. With Ally’s career prospects looking bleak, she tucks her tail between her legs, pops her cat in a carrier and sets off to visit Mom in her hometown of Leavenworth, a kitschy Bavarian-styled village nestled in the mountains of Washington state. It’s an out-of-the-ordinary setting for a rom-com; rejoice! When an old classmate recognizes Ally at the local watering hole, he excitedly tells her he and his wife love the show because “we just need something mindless to put on in the background.” She’s spent the last three years putting her blood, sweat and tears into this godforsaken show, only to have someone tell her it’s “something mindless.” Will the indignities never end?
Ally’s mortification transforms into a glimmer of optimism that soon curdles into something wildly inappropriate when she runs into an ex, played by “Insecure’s” Jay Ellis. The spark is still there. Surely this is the answer to all her problems. Except — whoops! — he’s engaged to someone else and the wedding is just days away.
Details, smeetails. Ally’s on a mission to reel that man back in for herself, and her plotting is very sly and leverages all her pretty girl plausible deniability. What — who, me? I’m just an old friend inserting myself into this celebration as the videographer for the couple’s big day! Haha, bonding with his parents. LOL, making myself the center of attention at one of the pre-wedding parties. Just harmless, beautiful, sparkling Ally hanging out with all her old friends, nothing strange about that.
But she knows exactly what she’s doing — and it’s terrible.
“Somebody I Used to Know” takes this outrageousness and grounds it in believable human behavior. The tone is naturalistic — funny and just slightly absurd — and unlike an alarming number of movies about the lives of women, this one actually seems to like women.
That includes the fiancee, played by Kiersey Clemons, who unwittingly finds this Ally-shaped saboteur in her midst, but she’s far more than a foil to Ally’s romantic plans. She has all kinds of insecurities of her own and she’s perceptive enough to sense that Ally’s presence is a red flag. Clemons has such a light touch here, playing it just right — a neutral smile plastered on her face, and yet so many thoughts roiling under the surface. It’s really subtle and smart. Ellis has less to do besides being handsome and not telling Ally to take a hike, but he also has enough realistic flaws that make him more than just a nice guy who’s being yanked around.
Ultimately, “Somebody I Used to Know” walks a tightrope with Ally, who is a likable character doing deeply unlikeable things. How the story resolves itself is one of the more inspired and thoughtful narrative gambits in recent memory, landing on a hard-won emotional maturity.
Even so, it’s conspicuous that the film skirts a certain detail: That Ally is a white woman attempting to wreck a Black couple’s future, which can look all sorts of ways depending on your point of view. The script doesn’t acknowledge this or consider more deeply why Ellis’ character — a Black man adopted by a white family, living in a predominantly white town in the Pacific Northwest and who has no other Black community — might be drawn to the idea of creating a family with a Black woman, in addition to being so clearly in love with her. The film doesn’t consider some of those nuances or Ally’s obliviousness to them.
The cast includes Danny Pudi as one of Ally’s old pals, and this might be his most laid-back performance to date, at once loose and charming (and an informal “Community” reunion for him and Brie). Sam Richardson and Zoe Chao also show up in a cameo as smiley network executives who cancel Ally’s show. (Yet another reunion of sorts; Franco worked with Richardson and Chao recently on the Apple TV+ series “The Afterparty.”)
If Ally is stuffing down conflicted feelings about her life’s trajectory, this is the moment when she’s forced to confront it all. You manipulate people for a living, someone says of her career in reality TV. No, she insists: “Most people are desperate to tell you how they feel, they just need permission to do so.”
There’s some truth in that. Also plenty of opportunism and exploitation. She works through some of the contradictions and forges a more adult and honest relationship with somebody she used to know: Herself.
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'SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout and brief drug use)
Running time: 1:45
How to watch: Prime Video
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