Review

Sleeping With Other People

Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey (Alison Brie), who are most emphatically not a romantic couple, attend a child’s birthday party while on mood-altering substances in Leslye Headland’s Sleeping With Other People.
Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey (Alison Brie), who are most emphatically not a romantic couple, attend a child’s birthday party while on mood-altering substances in Leslye Headland’s Sleeping With Other People.

Given how far the genre has slipped in recent years, it seems like faint praise to say that Sleeping With Other People, writer-director Leslye Headland's follow-up to her criminally underrated Bachelorette, is probably the best romantic comedy you'll see all year. One of the highlights of this year's Tribeca Film Festival, Sleeping is simply one of the most entertaining movies for consenting grown-ups to come along, a remarkably well-balanced combination of sweetness and raunch that, despite its embrace of a played-out form's conventions, manages to feel true to the way actual people behave and relate.

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Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis) are former lovers who reconnect and vow to remain platonic friends in the bawdy but sweet romantic comedy Sleeping With Other People.

That said, it starts out a little shakily by asking us to buy its 30-something leads, Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, as virgin college students Jake and Lainey getting to know each other after a not-so-cute meet in 2002 (we're cued in by OK Go's "Get Over It" blasting in the background). The movie soon flashes forward to the modern day as Jake and Lainey have gone their separate ways but are experiencing similar problems with monogamy.

Sleeping With Other People

89 Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Jason Mantzoukas, Adam Scott, Nastasha Lyonne, Amanda Peet

Director: Leslye Headland

Rating: R, for strong sexual content, language including sexual references, and some drug use

Running time: 101 minutes

Jake protests that he doesn't have a problem with commitment, he just doesn't want to commit to any of the women he's currently seeing. From his viewpoint, it's easier for him to let his girlfriends catch him sleeping with their friends (or sisters) than to attempt any sort of mature decoupling.

Meanwhile, Lainey is hung up on an emotionally unavailable guy, a cold-fish gynecologist named Matthew (Adam Scott) whom she's been chasing since college. Trouble is, Matthew has finally decided to get married. To someone else. Still, Lainey just can't quit him.

Jake and Lainey wind up at a 12-step program meeting for sex addicts where they reconnect and predictably determine that they will resist their mutual attraction and remain platonic friends, giving counsel to each other on romantic matters and otherwise providing support as they strive to develop healthier intimate relationships.

Refreshingly, from the very beginning Jake and Lainey understand that they're tremendously attracted to each other. But they suspect that sex would ruin their relationship, and neither is willing to risk that. As broad as the concept may seem, it's underpinned by a very realistic sense of human frailty. As lewd and rambunctious as it can be -- and, like Bachelorette, Sleeping With Other People has moments that might make Judd Apatow blush -- the movie never gives up its sense that all its characters are real, vulnerable people with hopes and insecurities that make them susceptible to self-deception.

And after that disconcerting beginning, Sudeikis and Brie deliver fantastic grounded performances in which they never betray their characters for a joke. Jake is a constant banterer, but the cleverness of his dialogue doesn't betray the underlying neediness -- what his best friend Xander (Jason Mantzoukas) diagnoses as Jake's compulsion to "repartee with everyone."

Chief among a number of standout scenes is a set piece where Jake and Lainey attend their friends' child's birthday party while high on Ecstasy -- Lainey's impromptu dance lesson is just, well, kind of awesome.

Headland has written a sharp, dynamic script and cast it extraordinarily well. While it's the nature of romantic comedies to fall into predictable rhythms, Sleeping With Other People doesn't capitulate to third-act mawkishness. It's a character-driven comedy about complicated but decent people trying to work through the sort of plausible problems most of us encounter at some point. It's funny, sexy and wonderfully free of reflexive irony. It's exactly what a romantic comedy ought to be.

MovieStyle on 10/02/2015

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