Alison Brie Sadly Missed The Heyday of The Big Screen Rom-Com, But She’s Excelling As A Queen of the FOMO Comedy

While Alison Brie scored a rare prestige-TV trifecta by appearing regularly on Mad Men, Community, and GLOW, her movie career did what a lot of mid-level movie careers do: Largely wasted her in supporting parts (like The Five-Year Engagement) that lost her in a big ensemble (like Scream 4) or traded on her beauty but not really her talent (like Get Hard). Brie, who can play both wide-eyed overachiever and weary slacker, seems like exactly the kind of star whose potential dimmed as Hollywood turned away from romantic comedies, especially smart ones; she more or less proved as much by starring in 2015’s Sleeping with Other People, one of the very best rom-coms of the 21st century so far. Despite being an accessibly bawdy riff on When Harry Met Sally…, with Brie and Jason Sudeikis as longtime acquaintances who reconnect and become intensely close while attempting to take a break from sex, the movie was barely released in theaters and remains an underseen gem.

So, after dipping into some unmemorable mainstream roles and reaching her movie pinnacle while no one was watching, where could Brie go next? Lately, she’s been co-writing her own vehicles, including the new Amazon Prime movie Somebody I Used to Know, and seems to have settled into an unusual, worthwhile niche: the post-romantic comedy. If Sleeping with Other People plays like an updated When Harry Met Sally, Somebody I Used to Know is like a less zany My Best Friend’s Wedding, while last year’s Spin Me Round is like a funhouse mirror version of Under the Tuscan Sun. Both movies place Brie in an unlikely romantic fantasy, and proceed to show just how complicated and untenable these movie-like scenarios can be. They’re comedies of FOMO and personal crisis as much as actual romance. 

Somebody I Used to Know doesn’t start off like a riff on My Best Friend’s Wedding, which makes its pivot even darker. At first, the movie bears suspicious resemblance to nothing so much as a Hallmark Christmas movie, with big-city professional Ally (Brie) returning to her quaint Bavarian-village hometown of Leavenworth and reconnecting with her ex-boyfriend Sean (Jay Ellis). But before Ally can fully renounce her compromised career as a reality-show producer (she once yearned to make documentaries!) and learn the true meaning of Christmas (it’s not actually Christmas), she finds out that Sean is engaged to marry Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons)—like, imminently. Against the warnings of her old friend Benny (Brie’s actual old friend and Community co-star Danny Pudi), Ally ingratiates herself into the wedding party and, sensing some tension in his relationship, toys with the idea of stealing Sean away.

In My Best Friend’s Wedding, the Julia Roberts character attempting to perform similar sabotage is supposed to have our benefit of the doubt because she’s played by a reigning com-com queen; that the bride she wants to displace turns out to be sweet and likable is treated as a kind of plot twist. Brie, despite her little-seen all-timer entry in the genre, pointedly lacks that kind of Julia-style audience relationship, making her decisions look messier and riskier from the jump. They’re semi-shenanigans that feel dangerous, and Brie, who co-wrote with director (and her real-life partner) Dave Franco, doesn’t emphasize Ally’s put-upon pluck or plead for audience sympathy. Ally and Sean’s initial reunion does have a heady, nostalgic rush, but the more the film reveals about its characters, the less suited they seem for rom-com logistics, as if they’ve failed to realize that they’ve outgrown those contrivances. 

Even the movie’s inconsistencies wind up serving this characterization. Though we eventually learn that Ally is somewhere around her early thirties, all of the pop-culture reference points we spy in her room (and even one, the Third Eye Blind song “Semi-Charmed Life,” that plays a part in the plot) date to around the late nineties (circa, in fact, the release of My Best Friend’s Wedding), which would make Ally and Sean about a decade older than they’re supposed to be (and closer to Brie’s actual age). Though the gaps are initially confusing, the movie has an eye for how years seem to slip away faster as you progress further into adulthood. As Somebody itself slips further away from the rom-com framework, it more closely resembles the wonderful Young Adult, and without that movie’s bite. Instead, it gets shakier, even a little noodly, before arriving at an ending that’s fitting enough, yet barely requires the events of the preceding 90 minutes to precipitate it. 

There’s even more noodling in Spin Me Round, which Brie wrote with her frequent director Jeff Baena. (They previously collaborated on the more harrowing Horse Girl.) Brie plays Amber, whose life starts to resemble a getting-your-groove-back travel romance like Under the Tuscan Sun, and then, quickly, a parody of it. Amber, a manager at an Olive Garden-like Italian restaurant chain, gets to travel to Italy and learn more about Italian cooking, but she’s stuck in a nondescript hotel with a bunch of weirdo fellow employees, and discouraged from venturing out into the actual cities or countryside. Desperate for genuine escape, she forges an unexpected connection with Nick (Alessandro Nivola), the chain’s wealthy owner; he whisks her away from the program, but not quite in the way she expects. The movie makes hairpin turns from romance to farce to comic thriller; it doesn’t always provide satisfying answers to some of its mysteries of human behavior, but tempers its cartoonishness with a genuine unpredictability that kinda-sorta resembles real life (in spirit, if not to the letter). 

In both movies—and in passages of Horse Girl, for that matter—Brie’s character is duped into thinking a rom-com-like scenario might iron out her untidy inner life, only to get tangled in screenplay-style intrigue and realize she’s seeking external solutions to internal problems. Of course, that’s part of what has helped Under the Tuscan Sun and especially My Best Friend’s Wedding endure and resonate in the first place: They’re romantic comedies where the heroines aren’t merely (or even principally) concerned with fulfilling a romantic fantasy, despite the temptations in front of them. On paper, Brie’s recent movies could nearly be read as loose remakes of these projects, echoing their themes rather than providing new commentary. 

What keeps both movies feeling halfway honest is Brie herself, and her distinctly layered persona: She often plays characters with a placid or hyper-professional surface, under which lurks palpable unease, under which glows a bit of unruly radiance. She excels at playing women who are at least somewhat aware of their power—Ally cycles through some eye-catching outfits once she decides to, well, catch some eyes at Sean’s wedding-weekend festivities—but hold themselves back, whether out of decorum or self-doubt. The less interesting versions of Somebody I Used to Know and Spin Me Round would be about these characters learning to take chances and put herself out there; instead, Brie writes herself women whose problems can’t be solved by simply living in the moment. The lessons are murkier, and the romance itself is far wispier, more sketchy idea than enduring love. These ideas dovetail with metatextual doubts about whether Brie, despite her charm and likability, really makes sense as a rom-com heroine—because really, do any of us apart from a handful of superstars slip easily into that role? For the post-rom-com, sometimes just living as your life’s main character is struggle enough. 

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.