Spin Me Round is a modest but overbaked rom-com

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.