Amber (Alison Brie) is stuck in year nine of a dead-end job managing a Bakersfield franchise of a beloved Italian restaurant chain called Tuscan Grove. Waking up next to her cat, her day-to-day includes training new employees on the cash register, breaking up fights in the kitchen, and reheating the chain’s signature Alfredo sauce in the microwave. This all changes when her boss (Lil Rel Howery) puts her forward for an all-expenses paid training trip to the company’s headquarters near Florence, Italy. What promises to be a life-changing experience slowly becomes a surreal nightmare.
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Co-written by Brie and director Jeff Baena, “Spin Me Round” features many of the same actors that made up Baena’s previous films like “Horse Girl” and “The Little Hours” including Brie, Molly Shannon, Debby Ryan, Jake Picking, Lauren Weedman, and Fred Armisen. While it’s always nice to see a company of actors working in step with a director over a course of many projects, this latest outing feels like an underbaked excuse for the troupe to traverse around Italy for a few weeks.
The locations are absolutely stunning, and cinematographer Sean McElwee captures the bright light of an Italian summer beautifully. Although promised a stay in an exquisite villa, Amber and her fellow attendees find themselves in a boring hotel with views of trash cans instead of azure waters. While quite a lot of the action takes place there — rooting much of the comedy in improv style training clichés like trust falls and get-to-know you exercises — there are also extended jaunts to cities around the Italian Riviera like Pistoria, La Spezia, Rigolo, and Lucca.
Brie is great at playing characters that are just a little bit off, their vulnerability hidden by sunshine and smiles. But unlike her riveting arc in “Horse Girl” which explored themes around mental health and generational trauma, it’s hard to tell what exactly makes Amber a great focal point for an entire film. Beginning the film in Bakersfield feels like a joke on the region rather than an authentic attempt to see the world from the point of view of a working class person from California’s Central Valley. Her fellow trainees hail from similar regions and are all played like caricatures of middle class America.
As she prepares to leave on her Italian adventure her friend Emily (Ego Nwodim, wasted in a clichéd Black best friend role) excitedly tells her she’s gonna fall in love. Clasping this naive wide-eyed romantic energy, and a copy of “Eat Pray Love,” Amber walks right into what could be the plot of any number of romance stories. From “Three Coins In The Fountain” to “When In Rome,” there’s any number of stories about American women who find love on the streets of Italy, and for a while it seemed it was this cinematic legacy Baena and Brie were set to satirize.
Enter Tuscan Grove founder and CEO Nick (Alessandro Nivola, “The Many Saints of Newark”). First introduced via a commercial for the chain, clearly aping Olive Garden commercials — you can get three full courses for $13.99! — Nivola’s Nick oozes a disarming charm casting a spell on all those in his wake. Like his offbeat performance in Riley Stearns’s black comedy “The Art of Self-Defense,” Nivola brings layers of absurdity to Nick. His attraction to Amber supposedly stems from her resemblance to his dead sister Connie, and the weirder his stories become the more Nivola wisely underplays his hand.
As Nick seduces Amber, the film plays with romance tropes. A sequence where Amber is whisked away for a dreamy day on Nick’s yacht by his sullen assistant Kat (Aubrey Plaza) is filmed like a hazy fantasy, with swelling music and lots of close-ups on Nick’s face, eyes, and lips as Amber daydreams about a fling with a rich man while he tells her about his life. Unfortunately, this exercise in style alone doesn’t help the film reach the fully satirical heights it aims for.
Plaza’s brand of acerbic irony is always welcome, but like most of the characters in the film, Kat is a sketch, not a fully realized character. Although she has great chemistry with Brie, she exists solely to bring Amber down to reality, pointing out that Nick charms everyone before exiting the film far too quickly. This revelation demolishes Amber’s romantic fantasy, replacing it with a more twisted conspiratorial one in its stead.
Just when it feels like the film is aiming to be a parody of the romance genre, it takes a much weirder zag into the sleazy world of artists and aristocrats that populate the Italian Riviera. Lots of coincidences add up to a ridiculous conclusion without much mystery, tension, or laughs, though it is filled with plenty of imagery meant to shock that comes across strangely anti-sex. The point of all this seems to be to remind everyone that rich people are vapid and weird and working class people are guileless at best, stupid at worst. Ultimately “Spin Me Round” is like a bad vacation where even the gorgeous Italian seaside isn’t enough to make the time spent feel worth it. [C-]
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