In Spin Me Round, the opening scenes of routine and repetition for Amber (Alison Brie, who co-wrote with director Jeff Baena) do not remotely hint at the direction in which the film will ultimately go. Amber is the definition of a clean-slate heroine – safe, sweet-enough and maybe a little bland in the way she seemingly lives to wake up, get ready for the day and go to work at an Italian restaurant. We must be careful not to refer to the restaurant as a “bistro,” really, since part of the food preparation involves squeezing a tube of generic white sauce onto equally plain-looking pasta noodles. In any case, since the plot here follows Amber from Bakersfield, California, to a prestigious culinary course in Tuscany, even the natural progression of food from plain to scrumptious mirrors the character’s journey.
Amber has never ventured outside the United States, and following a recent and dramatic break-up, doesn’t feel much like adventure these days. But the idea of a getaway is intriguing, especially when it comes to food. So when she’s invitated to take a culinary course in Italy, she jumps at the chance. After all, she gets to work with her company’s CEO Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), who greets everyone with an uncomfortable degree of familiarity and seems to be forever shadowed by his tireless and exhausted assistant Kat (Aubrey Plaza). But there is something a little off with Nick, like when he has Kat arrange an assignation with Amber on his private boat. Is there even more to Nick than meets the eye?
Nivola is the right amount of both charming and off-putting to sell this role. But Baena and Brie toss in a dizzying cavalcade of supporting characters: the perpetually bipolar Deb (Molly Shannon), the overly confident Fran (Tim Heidecker), the terminally cheerful Jen (Ayden Mayeri), the nebbish Dana (Zach Woods) and the carefree Valley Girl Susie (Debby Ryan), as well as group chaperone Craig (Ben Sinclair).
The screenplay doesn’t allow the expansive supporting cast to do much more than their own, improvisational thing. Only Plaza, as the underwritten and underutilized Kat, is given anything that might hint at personality or motivation, and her character is quickly forgotten. Woods is amusing as Dana, even though the joke surrounding his and Heidecker’s characters is in their androgynous names–and that’s about it. Otherwise, the characters each get one joke, which the actors play right into the ground.
The ultimate joke, if there is one, winds up being the very nature of the third act, in which every sinister or untoward thing about Nick turns out to be true in perhaps the grossest ways possible. It’s unclear, though, what Spin Me Round is trying to say about the extended gaslighting of Amber, beyond the fact that it’s happening, or what she learns about the experience after it all ends. This is a flat comedy, diabolical in theory but never in practice.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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