Tina Kakadelis
Amber (Alison Brie, also co-writer) has been the dedicated manager of a Tuscan Grove (essentially an Olive Garden) franchise location in Bakersfield, California, for nine years. As a top-performing manager, she is selected to attend an all-expense paid trip to attend a managers’ retreat at Tuscan Grove’s villa in Italy. When Amber arrives in Italy, she meets the owner, Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), and sparks fly. What begins as a whirlwind romance on the Italian coast turns into an adventure Amber never could have imagined.
Writer director Jeff Baena has assembled his usual cast of collaborators to fill the supporting roles here. Molly Shannon, Aubrey Plaza, Debby Ryan, and Fred Armisen have all worked with Baena on at least one of his previous films. To an extent, it’s nice to see the same cast in new territory. Spin Me Round is vastly different from the 1347 nunnery of The Little Hours and the contemporary zombie love story of Life After Beth.
On the other hand, the frequent collaborations may have made Baena and Brie’s script too lax. It seems that Spin Me Round hopes to coast on the inherent charm of these actors. Make no mistake, Plaza exudes pure charisma, but her scenes are fleeting. While audiences may find all of these actors entertaining in other works, only Plaza can fully count on charm alone. She brings an electricity to the scenes she’s in, and it’s in those moments that the audience can feel the full potential of the movie. The problem with hitching so much to Plaza’s character is that she exits midway through the film, with merely one line to explain her disappearance. Her absence snuffs out much of what keeps the film afloat.
The rest of the Spin Me Round characters don’t have any real motivation for their actions and they come across as stitled. The camera pops in and out of conversations that are likely meant to be humorous when taken out of context, but this becomes frustrating as the movie goes on. Even though she’s the film’s main character, the audience doesn’t know much about Amber. She’s never been out of the country and she’s generically sad, but that’s as deep as Spin Me Round wants to go.
With the hollow characters also comes a meandering plot. Somewhere around the 45-minute mark it becomes apparent that there might be something off about this manager’s retreat. Even then, there’s no lingering tension, simply because the audience is barely invested in these characters. The film’s main catalyst, the relationship between Amber and Nick, is developed by way of a montage.
Spin Me Round has a bit of an identity crisis. The first hour-and-a-half resemble an edgier Eat, Pray, Love, but the final twenty-five minutes veer so far off the rails it’s as though the ending to an entirely different movie was tacked on. There are also plenty of scenes throughout that are clear attempts at mocking corporate retreats and team bonding. It’s unclear which is the more interesting possibility for a story, because none of these different elements are fully formed ideas. Because there are so many varying thematic ideas at play, the characters feel as if they’re performing in their own separate film. When they’re forced to act together in the same scene, it becomes painfully obvious how incongruent the various setpieces are.
The film doesn’t answer why Brie and Baena wanted to write this script. What is Spin Me Round trying to say? It’s not funny enough to be a pure comedy and it’s not sharp enough to be a satire. Unfortunately, it feels like an improv exercise that takes place in Italy only because the actors wanted to have an international vacation during the pandemic. There’s simply nothing of substance that goes on during the movie that makes a case for a deeper purpose.
By the end of the movie, Amber has supposedly become a brand new person. She’s much stronger than the woman she was when the film began, but it’s a hollow transformation. Her characterization is flimsy to begin with, so it’s not surprising that her growth is just as shoddy. The ending is all the more disappointing because until that moment, the audience still has hope that somehow things can be fixed.
Spin Me Round suffers from having too many interesting ideas at play and no one to reign them in to create something that is coherent. It’s not that the movie requires viewers to read ten articles online to understand the ending. It’s that there’s nothing to make sense of. Despite an all-star cast, Spin Me Round never gets off the ground.
