ZERO STARS/****
starring Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey Clemons, Julie Hagerty
written by Dave Franco & Alison Brie
directed by Dave Franco
by Walter Chaw My Best Friend’s Wedding is vile, happy-go-fucky bullshit that polishes the sociopathic behaviour of a solipsistic narcissist to a patently plastic Julia Roberts sheen. It stinks of flop sweat and forced artificiality, and it made somewhere in the neighbourhood of a kabillion dollars because it traffics in exactly the sort of soft-racist, misogynistic horsepucky favoured by a demographic that likes blended drinks and doing mall walks. About 30 minutes into Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know, someone confronts someone else by saying, “You’re not doing some My Best Friend’s Wedding thing, are you?” And, well, she is. Credit for knowing just how unbearable your film is, I guess, this comedy of cringe where “naturalism” means ending every statement as a question and the main character is a pastiche of insufferable tropes who decorated her childhood room with a Sleater-Kinney poster, a pen-drawing of Joni Mitchell, and the “Have a Nice Daze” Dazed and Confused and American Movie teaser posters. Get it? That real clear picture of who this person is and who the people sketching her are? The song over the closing credits is Third-Eye Blind‘s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Got it now? There’s a Chance the Rapper sighting, too. Run. Fucking save yourself.
Ally (Alison Brie, one half of the team responsible for writing this; husband Dave Franco is the other) is a repulsive human being who, after her reality program is cancelled, returns to her hometown to snivel, whine, act like an entitled, garbage person, and maybe hook up with her ex-boyfriend, Sean (Jay Ellis), whom she clearly abandoned to pursue her dream of being a showrunner. Ally is also an unforgivable monster to her very sweet mom, Libby (Julie Hagerty), and the film isn’t much kinder, making Libby the butt of an ancient joke as she’s constantly walked in on having sex by her “surprise, I’m home!” daughter. (These assholes think every older woman now is fucking Jennifer Coolidge.) If Somebody I Used to Know were a To Die For conceit in which the centre of the film were a horrorshow of feckless ambition, that would be one thing. But Ally is the ostensible hero of her life, the one who will give Sean’s fiancée, Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons), lots of good white-woman wisdom at the moment Ally’s plans to sabotage Cassidy’s engagement are about to succeed. The one whose self-described “tits and bush” are so irresistible to poor, Black Sean that he’s ready to blow it all up. The one who, as an act of real largesse, gives over showrunning duties to her Persian-American assistant (Ayden Mayeri), who bursts into tears at the “honour” of receiving praise from a person who abandons her responsibilities and takes her for granted. The one who, as a grace note to her development, deigns at the end to accept a date from her Asian-American cameraman (Kelvin Yu)–immediately after she has, arguably, sexually harassed him in their workplace. Ally is good, you see. Adorably confused, but good. I’m pretty sure you know an Ally, too: It’s never her fault, it’s just that she deserves things.
The rancid meat on this brittle skeleton of a plot consists of uncomfortable scenes where Ally tries to sing in a bar after Cassidy’s band performs. Ally also takes a couple of opportunities to get naked because her dream project is to do a documentary on nudists–the important and personal project her day job has distracted her from. Then, as chantilly on the bilge cake, Ally betrays Cassidy’s wishes in one of the most invasively repugnant ways I can imagine, shy of actual, intimate, physical violation. There is a point, I believe, that a character is so consistently unlikeable and does so many awful things that there’s no coming back from it for an audience. The line for that is personal, of course, and your mileage may vary–but if you think Ally is reclaimable, I’m looking at you side-eyed so hard right now. Somebody I Used to Know is smug drool that has no idea what it’s saying but is empowered to do all the talking. When Ally complains to long-suffering, friend-zoned straight man Benny (Danny Pudi) that Cassidy is an air-brained hippie with rockstar delusions, the film doesn’t do anything to defuse the accuracy of her assessment. It’s not about Cassidy–nor Sean nor Benny, either. It’s about Ally, and how all these people inexplicably drawn to her work together to lead her to a moment of actualization about her own life. Consider Sean’s mom, Mel (Rochelle Maria Muzquiz), who adores Ally so much you’d think Ally’d given her a kidney and a kitten instead of heartache for her son. Ally the pure, Ally the desired, Ally with silk streaming out of her ass like the carnivorous spider she is. I’m done celebrating people like Ally. I’m done celebrating films like Somebody I Used to Know, created by people like Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who don’t entirely get that they’re the bad guys in history’s story. Semi-charmed life? Yeah, not because you earned it.
