Director Dave Franco’s “Somebody I Used To Know” follows a rom-com formula that can’t own up to its nature.
When we weren’t looking, romantic comedies become fantasies of acquiescence. “When Harry Met Sally …” is pivotal to this evolution. In Rob Reiner’s 1989 film, written by future rom-com maestro Nora Ephron, we’re invited to watch as two neurotic careerists come to realize they are meant to be together. Interspersed between sketch-like scenes are interviews with aging couples who recall when they fell in love. These couples are seen as the ideal, as stability incarnate, offering the audience a teaspoon of reassuring dullness that the protagonists are to achieve once they get their priorities straight and stop flitting between lovers. The film was a huge hit, and this cautious sensibility has come to dominate what’s left of the rom-com even now.
Romantic comedies, which are called screwball comedies if they date back to the 1930s and ‘40s, used to be celebrations of passion, of casting aside the shackles that “When Harry Met Sally …” celebrates as the end zone. Heiresses used to run out on their wealth for the scoundrel who got their heart pumping and the “establishment,” usually embodied by well-meaning saps played by people like Ralph Bellamy, was cast aside. This was probably a comforting message for Depression-era audiences: Money, which you don’t have, is a trap, go find yourself in some other way. Money unattainable leaves us with our other predominant obsession: sex. Go find intoxicating, chaotic, soul-nourishing and stability-challenging sex. This implication was swimming around in the romantic comedy as recently as in 1986, when “Something Wild,” Jonathan Demme’s brilliant fusion of romance and thriller, was released. “When Harry Met Sally…” set an opposing precedent, and Julia Roberts et al hammered it into stone.
The romantic comedy is mostly dead these days, probably in part because neither of these messages appeals to millennials and the generation that followed them. Millennials and younger don’t want to admit that they might fantasize about the classic nuclear family arrangement. That set-up is worse than square: It’s rife in all the gender/sexual conformity that contemporary generations are supposed to be working toward transcending. But, for all our talk of demonizing shame, we’re not having a sex positive moment as a society, either.
So where does a romantic comedy go these days?
Dave Franco’s “Somebody I Used to Know” offers an answer, which is to soft-pedal the clichés of nuclear domestic conformity so that they land lighter and easier in a self-conscious audience’s lap, with halfhearted validations of independence for dessert. The lifestyle porn that Nancy Meyers perfected is on display here too, but in a subtler key. Rather than featuring bougie kitchens and absurdly privileged weekend getaways, Franco lingers on woodsy cabins and local bars. Comfort, in other words, but with a chaser of local texture and an outdoorsy vibe to give the boutique feng shui a patina of “regular person.” Millennials and younger probably mostly want the same things as other generations, but, like my Generation X, egos must be salved. We have to think we’re special for wanting the things everyone wants, namely money and, as we get older, less sex than simply a day-to-day situation that isn’t a pain in the ass. Perhaps I’m identifying my own contradictions and hypocrisies, but somehow I doubt it. Franco has gone from an amusing actor to a shrewd panderer. He’s got his “Reality Bites” in him one day, believe me.
Written by Franco and his wife, Alison Brie, who also stars, “Somebody I Used to Know” is a smoothie blended from the pulp of “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Reality Bites.” From the first two, Franco pilfers fish-out-of-water situations and a farcical plot, and from the latter he borrows self-consciousness and a few character details. These impulses cancel themselves out. Farce relies on stereotypes; they are built on broad characterizations bouncing off of one another for comic friction. Franco substitutes overt stereotypes with those that are more modern and insidious. The millennial characters in the film are all so nice and so self-help driven, ready to actualize on cue to be their best selves. Characters who talk an evolved game, while following their avarice impulses anyway, is a good foundation for satire; and Franco mined this very tendency in his unnerving “The Rental.” Here, however, he scrubs these lovely people free of warts so that we may enjoy his very effective tourist ad for visiting Washington state. If rom-coms come back, and I feel that they will, Franco lays a precise road map for how they may have their cake and eat it as well.
Brie plays Ally, a show-runner for an absurd reality TV series that represents her selling out her dreams of being a documentary filmmaker. A careerist who’s sold out: check. That can fit either previous classic mold of romantic comedy. In turmoil after the show is cancelled, Ally returns to her hometown of Leavenworth, Washington to regroup, getting reacquainted with the kooky locals who are defined as being less intelligent and ambitious than her. Check. That belongs with a lot of movies with Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon, or, more recently, in many Hallmark Christmas productions. Except that Franco can’t admit that he’s placing Ally in a position of superiority, so instead of culture-clash jokes we get scenic montages and talks of how we shouldn’t compromise our dreams for other people. Relationships are, nearly by definition, an act of compromise, but that inconvenience would complicate Franco’s audience flattery.
Anyway, you get my point. We’re following a formula that can’t own up to its nature. Ally’s former beau, Sean (Jay Ellis), surfaces, and he’s wonderful and attractive and well-adjusted, except that he expects his fiancée, Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons) to give up her band so that they can live in his perfect cabin on his parents’ perfect retreat. He’s got money and stability—he’s the Ralph Bellamy or Dermot Mulroney character, except that he talks a better game about accommodating Cassidy’s needs. Cassidy is a sexually fluid traveling musician and Sean is a straitlaced Black man adopted by a white family, but those differences aren’t examined and don’t influence the narrative in any way except to further flatter the audience. Once again, above all else “Somebody I Used to Know” suggests a travel ad beckoning us to come see Leavenworth.
Ally wants Sean back, and she sees the dispute over Cassidy’s music career as a means of separating the couple. Since two women fighting over a man is a plot development that’s behind the current times, Franco leaves it hanging. But since Franco doesn’t want to be too progressive, he can’t follow up on Ally and Cassidy’s blossoming attraction either. That’s a shame because that twist might’ve given this film a true surge of romantic complication, and Brie and Clemons have far more chemistry with one another than either of them do with Ellis. The women exchange a few mean glances and then … bond over their sisterhood. It’s poignant in a derivative way, sort of, but not exactly uproarious or exciting. It’s a testament to Franco’s control as a director that this bland movie goes over as well as it does. It’s an easy, low-stakes watch. You can drift in and out of the Washington scenery and someone can wake you up once Ally realizes that she needs to reconnect with her filmmaking and let Sean go, finding her true self and a potential new lover and stability, thusly having everything from every form of rom-com.
Rom-coms have always been contrived, false, and designed to satiate our various selfish whims—to deny that is to deny their essence, what can be their wonderful superficiality and vulgarity. A movie like “Somebody I Used to Know” attempts to transcend its cinematic ancestors simply by feigning virtuousness; namely by slowing the same old plot down so that you mistake it for a generational character study. If you want to do something new, then do something new. Or, if you want to do the same old shtick, then be a true entertainer and sand those clichés down until they sparkle. The middle lane is hypocritical, but one doesn’t even get to enjoy the bitter forcefulness of said hypocrisy here, as one could in the profoundly self-delusional “Reality Bites.”
The only person in this movie who seems to understand what I’m saying is Haley Joel Osment as somebody’s friend, or relative, or something. He’s playing a well-meaning nerd, and rather than offering a seminar on his need to be understood, he gives his lines a casual lunatic spin that’s frequently hilarious. He leans into the farce, rather than attempting to ward it off with banality. Osment’s evolution from child prodigy to indie cinema’s favorite pot-bellied rascal continues to be a welcome surprise. “Somebody I Used to Know” should’ve been about him, as Osment has it in him to bridge the film’s warring elements. Osment creates a character who knows he’s an oddball, loves it, and doesn’t give one shit what you think about his vibe. He’s actually actualized.
“Somebody I Used to Know” will be available to stream on Amazon Prime this Friday.