The Film Experience

Tribeca ends tonight but we'll have a few more reviews for you as the team finishes up. Here's Joe Reid...

After the phenomenal success of Bachelorette (creatively if not commercially; I'm still fuming that it never got the promotional push it deserved), I expected Leslye Headland's follow-up film to have that same dark-heart-with-teeth approach to the tried and true "can men and women be friends" comedy. Intriguingly, a few things about that statement turned out to be not the case. The humor in Sleeping with Other People is still incredibly sharp, but where Bachelorette was as hard as nails when it came to female singlehood in a wedding-drenched world, Sleeping with Other People puts its beating heart on display.

Which isn't to say Headland has gone soft. [More...]

From the very beginning, a college-dorm meet-cute between sloppy Lainey (Allison Brie) and not-at-all-convincing-as-college-aged Jake (Jason Sudeikis), is charged with a straightforward sexuality. But while lesser sex comedies tend to throw all their sex talk and brazen imagery in your face, Sleeping with Other People wields its sexual frankness with maturity and a respect for the audience that frees it up from mere titillation and lets it speak to something real.

The chemistry between Sudekis and Brie sure helps. Lainey and Jake lose their virginity to each other that night they met in college, and then they don't encounter one another again until the present, when they're bother borderline sexual compulsives who at the very least have made some pretty poor decisions. It's kind of unfair that she has to be the messy harlot, carrying on a secret affair with a gynecologist (Adam Scott), while Jake just gets to be your standard issue womanizer. But as Lainey and Jake re-connect, and decide that they're better for each other not as sexual partners (despite a mutual attraction powerful enough to require a safe word) but as friends who can help each other curb their mutual bad habits, both characters deepen and complicate.

At its heart, Sleeping with Other People is a very funny movie, particularly when the ensemble expands to include Jake's married friends (Jason Mantzoukas and Andrea Savage), but where it elevated itself for me was in the moments where it took its relationships seriously. The movie doesn't entirely avoid the land mines that pepper the terrain of every will-they-or-won't-they romantic comedy. We know that they will, and in that sense there's a kind of clockwatching that happens, waiting for the inevitable. But the movie never behaves like it's a foregone conclusion, and that's a crucial enough difference. There's a scene where the two are lying in bed together, where in any other movie they'd have sex and wake up with confused/hurt feelings in preparation of a third-act de-tangling. Instead, what we get is a moment of bracing emotional honesty, one that stacks up against the film's best sex-comedy scene (a demonstration with a bottle that should really be experienced fresh).

For as thorny as Bachelorette was, the secret to that movie was that Hedland had secret reserves of care and respect for all her characters. InSleeping with Other People, that care and respect are no longer secret. I was particularly impressed by how Amanda Peet's character, who would be a mere stumbling block at best in other comedies, gets to be a real person here. That kind of dedication to seeing all characters as people kind of trips up the movie near the end, when characters we don't necessarily need show up for the sake of not being so myopic about Brie and Sudekis' characters, but I'd rather a filmmaker err on the side of broadening the canvas than restricting it. Sleeping with Other People sees the whole board, and it's better for it.