Spin Me Round is a modest but overbaked rom-com
Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza head to Italy for a corporate retreat in Jeff Baena’s most mainstream film to date
Film Reviews Spin Me Round![Spin Me Round is a modest but overbaked rom-com](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2022/08/15010331/a03853fb992b3bc5e5ed2c4b43660f65.jpg)
Reflecting upon a film like Spin Me Round, it helps to keep Roger Ebert’s classic quote in mind: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” The new film from director Jeff Baena is, on its Euro-sheen surface, a romantic comedy about Amber (Alison Brie), an unambitious thirtysomething manager at a low-rent Italian restaurant who finds love and adventure while on a corporate retreat in Italy. “How it is about it” is more complicated.
Baena is a director of comedic curios like 2017’s The Little Hours, but here he whips up a romcom soufflé that combines genre clichés, laughs, mystery and danger and then purposely overbakes it until it becomes dark and a bit nasty. If that sounds like a modestly twisted comedy that turns Hallmark movies on their ear, that it is. If it also sounds like it might have trouble blending tropes and tones into a single cohesive work, well, that’s true too. Spin Me Round is a nice-try attempt at a shapeshifting, fish-out-of-water rom-com that was probably funny in the room—but in the end, it doesn’t quite come together as a movie.
Since establishing his oddball credentials as co-writer of David O. Russell’s 2004 comedy quirkfest I Heart Huckabees, Baena has become a director who succeeds (Joshy) as often as he fails (Life After Beth) in looking at story and character from weird angles in a quest for something fresh. His taste can border on the softly subversive, so it’s a bit disappointing that Spin Me Round, his most mainstream film to date, takes only modest jabs at romantic comedy tropes, and is willing only to lightly sauté corporate culture instead of thoroughly roasting it. He zeroes in on Amber, played by the always terrific Brie (GLOW), who also co-wrote the script with Baena. Straitlaced and unworldly, Amber admits to having “no special talents,” which contrasts nicely with the craziness that unfolds around her, but it makes for a less-than-riveting main character.
When we meet her, she’s been toiling away for nine years at the Bakersfield, California, location of Tuscan Grove, a mediocre Italian restaurant where the gluey alfredo sauce is unceremoniously squeezed out of industrial-sized pouches. As one of the chain’s top managers, Amber is rewarded with an all-expenses-paid trip to their Tuscan Grove Institute in Italy. With her copy of the novel Eat Pray Love at the ready and suitably encouraged by her BFF Emily (Ego Nwodim, saddled with the clichéd Black best friend role), Amber jets off to Italy to hone her craft, get her drink on and maybe even enjoy a vacation romance.
The setup is purposely familiar, but we figure Baena is just easing us in before revealing his hand. Amber soon learns that she’s not staying in the company’s fabulous villa, but instead in the motel next door. Amber receives useless cooking lessons in a drab conference room where she’s surrounded by her fellow Tuscan Grove employees, a motley and often very funny crew whose low and relaxed comedic expertise accounts for most of the film’s pleasures. Especially good is Molly Shannon as Deb, the co-dependent, personal boundary-averse kook; Tim Heidecker as Fran, the clueless blowhard who’s been “dabbling in molecular gastronomy;” and Silicon Valley’s Zach Woods as Dana, the ultimate Tuscan Grove fanboy. The group’s handler is Craig (a terrific Ben Sinclair, looking like he stepped out of an ’80s summer camp comedy), whose job is to suck the joy out of everyone’s European experience by instituting a curfew and prohibiting Amber and her cohorts from leaving the motel except on official field trips.
Amber’s chances for an Italian romance improve when Tuscan Grove’s dreamboat owner, Nick, makes a surprise appearance at the institute. Nick is played by Alessandro Nivola (The Many Saints of Newark), who gives a well-modulated performance that constantly vacillates between charming and just a bit smarmy. Nick gives la bise to all the attendees (including a hilariously ditzy Ayden Mayeri) except the older Deb, and he doesn’t even say hello to Fran. He immediately takes an intense interest in Amber, but we don’t entirely trust it. He gazes into her eyes a beat too long, and his intimate questions about her life and her relationships come off as creepy.
Nick’s assistant is Kat, played by Aubrey Plaza as acerbic and “over it,” which is how she plays most roles, and she’s very good at it. Plaza and Brie both appeared in Baena’s Joshy and The Little Hours, and here they make a winning pair. Kat is Amber’s corrupting influence, the one who leads her down the rabbit hole to sample a more exotic and daring kind of life. More than once, Kat whisks Amber away from Craig’s boring lesson in Italian culture (which includes watching Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, which Craig hears is “hysterical”) to rendezvous with Nick. But even when Amber finally begins to experience the adventure she dreamed of, it distinctly feels like Kat is grooming her (potentially along with other women) for Nick, which sends out troublesome, if unintentional, vibes that recall Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell. Baena’s offbeat humor can only partially overcome the sour taste, so maybe it’s for the best that Kat abruptly and clumsily exits the film, with nagging questions about her behavior still lingering.
By the time Nick’s motives are revealed, in a busy and unsatisfying climax that features rampaging wild boars and an Eyes Wide Shut-style orgy, Spin Me Round trades what worked best for something that serves Baena’s impulse to be wild and eccentric. He clearly revels in the notion that we have no idea where the story is headed. And while its laudable for any film to go to places we could never have predicted, that choice comes at the expense of Amber’s rather unenlightening journey of self-discovery. Italy is a long way to go to learn that work and pleasure don’t mix, and that fantasy and reality rarely make for more than passing acquaintances. Despite a decent amount of laughs, such takeaways hardly seem worth the trip—for her or for us.
46 Comments
Alison Brie can spin me anywhere she wants.
Other than the fact Alison Brie apparently doesn’t age, Aubrey Plaza is way, way hotter.
Ms. P. has her fans (particularly around here) but I am solidly Team Alison.
I’m old…
Done correctly:
You’re old too, just not as old as me.
I mean, the secret is in the name really. Alison Brie sounds like a delicious cheese. Aubrey Plaza sounds like somewhere you stop to pee when on a road trip.
I don’t think you’re allowed to talk about Aubrey Plaza like that around The A V Club!
I got a notifica di Comunità for this?!
Il papa papa!
Bippity boopity? Eyyyyy, pasta e fagioli!
babitaboopi?
Biblioteca?
Baba…Booey?
Annie è piuttosto giovane, cerchiamo di non sessualizzarla
Best AV Club comment in years. And we can all play! Wtf è starz lol? Aiuto! Sono bloccato nei grigi!
This may sound strange, but the trailer’s font and credit sequence gives a very Woody Allen vibe.
Eat Pray Love is a memoir
Alessandro Nivola (The Many Saints of Newark Face/Off)
That cast is good enough (Annie & April!) to make me look past any grade score
how many movies have they been in together? there’s this and happiest season…
bummer that this is not as good as it should be, given the cast… minus fred armisen. always minus fred armisen.
Little Hours is the example cited earlier, since Baena also directed it. Checking up on Joshy (which I never saw), they’re both in that as well.
Except that neither of them generally tend to really be in good movies very often.
I thought Happiest Season is pretty good for what it is. Jeff Baena seems to be a terrible filmmaker otoh. Even though I enjoyed Horse Girl, I’m definitely in the minority there. The rest of his output is quite awful.
Horse Girl was fine until it totally chickened out with that weak-ass ending
Does meatspin.com still exist? I thought this was going to be a movie adaptation of that.
I really miss GLOW
i think aubrey plaza and betty gilpin together in a movie would make for some good times.
Just one more season and they could have wrapped it all up nicely.
I prefer to like things, but I fucking hate Olive Garden.
I prefer to like things, but I fucking hate Olive Garden.
Why do my comments keep disappearing? I refuse to think people dismiss them.
Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza together in Italy sounds like an absolute dream.
And Tricia Helfer is in this movie too?!? How did she not come up in the review?
The Little Hours was also Brie and Plaza in Italy (albeit medieval Italy)… and it was a big ol’ bag of “meh”.
If you want some awesome Brie/Plaza combo, watch The Little Hours. It’s unexpected.
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It sounds a little like they’re mocking the premise of Love & Gelato from earlier this year, although the most likely explanation is that a romcom about an American woman visiting Italy for the food is too obvious an idea. It raises the question: should Susanna Skaggs be cast as the younger version of Alison Brie or Aubrey Plaza in some other film.
So it seems that “Tuscan Grove” is supposed to be a parody of Olive Garden. Does Olive Garden actually have an training institute in Italy? I mean, the idea of chain restaurants having such things isn’t unheard of, most famously McDonald’s has its “Hamburger University” in Chicago for training managers, but actually having an institute in the country that the chain food theoretically is from seems extreme.
I thought it might be more like a Jamie Oliver/Wolf Gang Puck kind of chain. Fancy chef name that is still pumping out industrial grade food.
I remember they featured something like this in a television commercial back in the 2000s.I just Googled it and it’s the Olive Garden Culinary Institute. It’s “real” but it’s fake. They basically rent out a hotel during the off season, fly a bunch of managers over to Italy, take them sightseeing, toss in a few food “classes”, take pictures, and then use it for PR.https://www.eater.com/2011/4/11/6687399/olive-garden-actually-has-a-tuscan-cooking-school-kind-of
How Tusken Got His Grove Back
Interesting the article didn’t mention that Baena and Plaza are married.
How much did Heidecker pay to be in this one?