“Sleeping With Other People” Is Thoroughly Enjoyable

Sleeping with Other People, writer-director Lesyle Headland’s follow-up to Bachelorette (2012), saws off the more robustly salty bits of her first film in favor of a safe-in-the-arms-of-formula romantic comedy starring Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis as Lainey and Jake. But the comfort of watching a film whose beats and conclusion you could have predicted from frame one is no small pleasure. Brie and Sudeikis, the former especially, give fine performances as two 30-somethings with commitment/sex problems who lost their virginity to each other back in college and are reunited at a meeting for sex addicts.

They make a pact to not sleep with one another, as he is a chronic cheater and she is stuck on Matthew (Adam Scott), the man she had originally intended to have her first sexual encounter with in college. (And Scott plays the mustachioed and humorless Matthew with wonderful straight-faced commitment to being an utterly dull schmuck.)

However, it soon becomes abundantly clear to the audience as well as their friends that Lainey and Jake are perfect for one another and that they are basically in a relationship sans any of the sexual benefits. But Lainey may be moving to Michigan to finally go to med school and Jake is afraid to screw things up, etc., etc. The specifics of the difficulties keeping them apart don’t really matter as these “obstacles” only serve as excuses to delay the inevitable and give Headland time to write in a diversionary romance between Jake and his boss Paula (Amanda Peet).

Paula, as the other romantic option in Jake’s life, is thankfully not given the typical short shift that is so often the domain of the “other woman” who stands in the way of the union of the romantic leads. (My mind always travels to An American in Paris‘s brusque treatment of Nina Foch as a hard and dusty stumbling block in the way of Gene Kelly’s union with Leslie Caron.) Paula is smart, funny, and when everything falls apart, someone with self-respect and a backbone.

But the best part of the film is (unsurprising to the growing cult of fans she’s cultivated since Community) Alison Brie’s performance, which calls on her comedic deftness as well as dramatic vulnerability. The scene that stands out particularly strong in memory comes early when she’s just been publicly dumped by her boyfriend (a delightfully hammy Adam Brody) at a restaurant. After he calls her a whore and storms out, she goes into the bathroom and is every bit a woman on the verge of nervous breakdown, anxiety tightening her face and upper body, her breath coming in short struggling spasms verging into hysteria. And then in a single woosh, it is all released as she looks down at her phone and sees a text from Matthew.

Headland relishes sexual frankness and there is one particular scene in which Jake teaches Lainey about masturbation and how to stimulate the clitoris (“the trick is to be a little rude to the clitoris…like you’re scratching a record”) that in 2015 still feels like a welcome and too-hushed up point of conversation. Sleeping with Other People is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of romance for a too hot and airless, at least in the Bay Area, September.