Writer-director Leslye Headland’s Sleeping With Other People is the second romantic comedy in recent months (following Trainwreck) that sets out to reinvent the genre only to succumb to all of the same old formulas, serving up the clichés of the form without managing to deliver any of its satisfactions. Sleeping With Other People is a better movie than Trainwreck—at its best it cuts deeper, and it doesn’t have anything as embarrassing as Trainwreck’s bizarre final musical number or misplaced celebrity cameos—but in a way that makes its failures all the more obvious. It comes so close to being a good movie that Headland’s constant tonal missteps become not only dispiriting but downright irritating. She constantly sets up opportunities she then squanders before the audience’s very eyes.
The movie opens with a prologue in which we meet Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis), a pair of college students who lose their virginity to each other and then lose touch. Twelve years later, Jake is a serial womanizer (allegedly—like many other things we’re supposed to take on faith via the dialogue, we don’t actually see much of this in action) and Lainey finds it impossible to avoid cheating on her current boyfriend (Adam Brody) with her now engaged ex (Adam Scott). Lainey and Jake run into each other when they attend a meeting for sex addicts, a clunky sequence that unfortunately sets the tone for most of what is to come.
The notion of sex addicts falling in love is a promising one for a romantic comedy—so promising, in fact, that another, far better movie, 2013’s Thanks for Sharing already beat Headland to it. In that film, sex addiction is an integral component of the characters, leading to both hilarious and devastatingly sad scenes in which the condition gets in their way. In Sleeping With Other People it’s just a gimmick, a way of getting around the difficulty of creating viable obstacles for lovers in a contemporary romantic comedy. Virtually the minute the idea is introduced it’s dropped. We never buy that either of these characters actually are sex addicts or would even be at the meeting; it’s just a way for Headland to create a meet-cute scene in an unusual setting.
Herein lies my issue with this film and two of Headland’s earlier works, Bachelorette and the About Last Night remake, which she co-wrote: She’s always willing to forgo careful characterization in favor of a cheap laugh or easy effect. That might be okay if the cheap laughs were funnier, but the comedy in Sleeping With Other People is agonizingly strained; characters constantly drop intrusive pop culture references or do things that make no sense for the sake of a laugh, but the laughs never come because they’re not motivated by anything. To be fair, what Headland is up to here requires a tricky balance, because I’m sure that defenders of the film would say what I see as inconsistent sloppiness is in fact an expression of the messiness and complexity of contemporary relationships, and that real people (and some of the most interesting movie characters) often act against their own self-interest. Fair enough. But there’s a difference between messy, contradictory characters and incoherent filmmaking, and Sleeping With Other People doesn’t have the sense of craft to pull off what it’s attempting.