Spin Me Round Review: A Voyage to Italy Leads to Overcooked Anti-Romance

If there’s one image that’s emblematic of Spin Me Round, it’s the mass-produced alfredo sauce that crops up throughout, from the opening credits to the climactic encounter. Situated at the point where it will have the least impact—precisely where expected, forced to compete with the names of the cast members—the film’s only conspicuous montage begins with a frothy sea of what turns out to be that alfredo sauce, lit by a dreamy sunset.

From there, Jeff Baena’s film transitions into shots of the assembly line, with gleaming nozzles pushing out a glop the color and texture of latex into a procession of plastic membranes stamped with nutrition facts, to a soundtrack of smooth jazz. While this sequence gets across the anti-romantic themes of Spin Me Round, it also lets the film’s own formulaic sterility out of the bag. Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity. By failing it succeeds and vice versa.

The story takes its beats from the romance films that it aims to ironize. Amber (Alison Brie) manages an Olive-Garden style restaurant, Tuscan Grove, where she’s worked for nine years, in Bakersfield, California. She’s getting over a difficult breakup. Invited on an all-expenses paid trip to a company retreat in Italy, she accepts, her craving for romance reactivated by the prospect of travel. But when she arrives, the illusion starts to crumble: Instead of the villa she and her fellow managers were led to expect, they’re lodged in what amounts to a Holiday Inn.

Amber soon catches the eye of Tuscan Grove’s CEO, Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), and the next day his assistant, Kat (Aubrey Plaza), whisks her off to the seaside for a day on his yacht. Amber is initially smitten with the idea of Nick, but when he eventually reveals to her that she’s the spitting image of his dead sister, they have a falling out, after which Kat takes over the seduction where Nick left off. Disillusioned, Amber returns to the hotel, where she and fellow manager Dana (Zack Woods) begin to suspect a conspiracy where, year after year, Nick, Kat, or both handpick managers to seduce and invite them to the retreat.

In lifting the veil of fantasy and exoticism to reveal the pathetic, ego-driven manipulations of Nick and his Tuscan Grove empire, the film’s undercutting of romance tropes takes on a lifelessness of its own, sanding down anything that might make it stand out. Spin Me Round ends up being not just an anti-romance but, unintentionally, an anti-comedy, offering up the hollow structures of the sitcom standard of setup-punchline-reaction but emptied of humor. The gentle fun it pokes at a culture of Americanized family friendly casual dining that has spread its sameness across the globe ends up contently acquiescing to its ubiquity.

Characters who, confronted with the prospect of growth and change attributed to foreign travel—or, in the case of Molly Shannon’s Deb, a switch in medication—all revert to their former states. Tim Heidecker’s casting comes across as an attempt to channel the grotesquery and absurdism of Tim and Eric, but his character begins and ends as a pretentious buffoon. There’s enough cynicism here to deflate the love story but not enough imagination to replace it with anything else. All of which is encapsulated in the image of Amber, back at the Tuscan Grove in Bakersfield, smiling at her reflection in the microwave used for reheating pasta.

The film’s awareness extends as far as self-parody, and no further. Spin Me Round discards romance and, with a shrug, embraces the entropic leveling of distinctions between nations, regional cuisines, genres, and people. In light of which, the title of Baena’s film comes to suggest not so much the whirlwind of emotion that can sweep someone off their feet as it does the proper way to bundle linguini on the prongs of a fork.