SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE – The Review

SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE is a forgettable, by-the-numbers romantic comedy that relies on tiresome clichés and unfunny sex jokes. The newest from writer/director Leslye Headland opens at Columbia University in 2002 where students Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey (Alison Brie) lose their virginity to each other one night. Jump ahead 13 years and horndog Jake is reintroduced having an angry confrontation with his current girlfriend over his serial inability to stay committed. Meanwhile, Lainey is having an affair with Matt Sovochek (Adam Scott), now a gynecologist married to pregnant Emma (Katherine Waterston). After over a decade of not having contact with one another, Jake and Lainey reconnect at a sex addiction support group meetings. They suddenly become platonic best friends, venting their  frustrations over their sexual and romantic lives while falling for each other in the process.

I suppose the audience is expected to laugh at the assumed outrageousness of all the explicit dialog about sex, but just talking about sexual preferences, sexual hang-ups, favorite sexual positions, etc, doesn’t translate to laughs without some wit behind the writing. SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE goes nowhere unexpected and its basic plot only reminds viewers how good a movie WHEN HARRY MET SALLY is. There’s the standard misunderstood move by one of them that ends up separating the pair to different cities, leaving the audience to wonder whether or not the two will ever get back together again. Well, it leaves those who have never seen a romantic-comedy in their entire life wondering whether or not the two will ever get back together again. We wait for the pair to realize their silly mistakes but by the end, when everyone should be rooting for Sudekis and Brie, the whole enterprise has long since soured. You don’t really care what they do—get married, break up, join the Peace Corps and a nunnery—as long as they don’t change their minds again and keeps this lousy movie going. If it had been a little funnier or less predictable (or had thrown in some nudity), perhaps it could have been salvaged but SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE is full of terrible scenes. A masturbation lesson where Jake uses the opening of a milk bottle to teach Lainey how to touch herself is just icky and the film really lost me when when the pair show up at a child’s birthday party high on ecstasy so Lainey can strip down to her underwear and dance for the kiddies.

One major problem with SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE is that the tepid Sudeikis and full-on sexy Brie seem woefully mismatched. She’s adorable and feisty – full of energy and emotion. Sudeikis, not so much, and that’s disappointing. He has been hilarious in ensemble comedies but in a lead, especially one in which he should be doing more than just comedy, he comes off a smug presence who delivers every line in the same aggressive stand-up tone. No one in the supporting cast stands out. Adam Scott is an unpleasant twerp, while Katherine Waterston, so good and so sexy in INHERENT VICE, is wasted in a small role as is Amanda Peet in a larger one as Jake’s boss who’s not as hard to seduce as she thinks she is. I did enjoy seeing Natasha Lyonne as Lainey’s ubiquitous gay best friend (every lame comedy must have one), but more because she’s a likable actress I hadn’t seen onscreen in a while.

Lainey and Jake are self-declared sex addicts, yet unlike other films on that subject such as CHOKE and THANKS FOR SHARING, the screenplay never addresses the thorny seriousness of sexual compulsion. These characters don’t seem to have a problem with it and the 12-step meetings are simply used as a cute place for our leads to get reacquainted. It’s frankly exhausting to keep up with these two neurotic over-sharers, who are neither serious enough to care about nor humorous enough to laugh at.

1 of 5 Stars

SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE opens in St. Louis October 2nd exclusively at Landmark’s The Tivoli Theater