Someone Great
by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Feigco Entertainment
Look for something new to watch on Netflix? Yes? Then read this squee from Darbi Bradley!
You can find Darbi on Twitter (@darbibradley). She is a romance reader from Toronto, Canada currently living in Washington, DC. She hasn’t thought about moving home since November 2016. Not once…
…
Right at this moment, I’m on my couch in my pjs. It’s a rainy Friday night, and I’m about three-quarters of the way through a deeply mediocre bottle of white wine. I just got off the phone with my best friend and I can honestly say – I’ve had the time of my life.
Weeks ago my friend and I made a date to long-distance watch the new Netflix comedy Someone Great, and I gotta tell you. It was something great. It’s really freaking great, you guys.
Right off the bat, because I am a responsible member of #romancelandia, I do want to say that it is not a romance, but it is a love story. A love story between a girl and her friends, herself, and her future. It’s about growing up and about nostalgia for a very recent past. It’s about realizing that you can love someone and something but that you still need to move on, and how that’s not a bad thing. It’s about taking the bitter with the sweet and realizing how lucky you’ve been.
And it’s about a bangin’ soundtrack.
At the beginning of the film we meet Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) who has just gotten her dream job working for Rolling Stone in San Francisco, and who has been dumped by her boyfriend of 9 years, Nate (Lakeith Stanfield). To deal with her heartbreak, Jenny has “one last crazy night” in New York City with her two best friends – Erin (DeWanda Wise) and Blair (Brittany Snow) before she leaves for California. The story is told partly in flashbacks, so we see the meet-cute beginnings of Jenny and Nate’s relationship, as well as the friendship of the three girls back in college. The flashbacks are all shot in gorgeous neon lighting that really emphasizes the dreamy quality of first love, and provide a nice contrast to the scenes set in the present day.
In the present day, we follow Jenny looking like a mess as she gathers her girls (even jailbreaking Blair out from work), gathers some booze and other accessories, and gathers tickets to Neon Circus – an underground music festival that had meaning for her and Nate. As much as Jenny wants to cut loose with her girls, and believes that she’s totally fine with the break-up, she also is hoping to see Nate at Neon Circus. Gina Rodriguez plays this perfectly, veering wildly between bravado one minute, and tearfully belting out Selena’s “Dreaming of You” in a bodega the next.
Throughout the hijinks and adventures, we hit some of the classic “romcom/one crazy night” beats that we’re all familiar with. New York City – it’s a character in itself! We even get the wacky cameos – Questlove, RuPaul, Rosario Dawson, and Jaboukie Young-White. That said, throughout the film what really stands out is the relationship between Jenny, Erin, and Blair. This movie fully passes the Bechtel Test! Each woman has their own thing they’re dealing with – Jenny is going through a break up, Erin is dating a girl she really likes but is finding it difficult admit she has real feelings, and Blair feels trapped in a relationship she no longer really wants. The women themselves are a unit: there’s an easy familiarity between the three, even a gross intimacy (Jenny and Erin poop together on FaceTime) that comes from YEARS of knowing each other. Jenny is being dramatic and clearly driving Blair and Erin crazy, but they still have her back no matter what.
As an urban, millennial woman, I found Someone Great hilariously relatable. I too love brunch, and find the idea of a green juice mimosa kind of brilliant. I still live in the city where I went to college, and still have lingering nonsense with boys from back then. I also have friends who have jobs I don’t really understand. At one point Blair says she can’t take off work because she has a hashtag rollout. Erin has to ask: is this a rollout of a hashtag, or is it a #rollout.
Someone Great is hilarious and touching in equal measure. I can already tell it will be going into heavy rotation with other diverse female-led classics I love like To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Pitch Perfect, Set It Up, and Blockers. I will say, Someone Great really does earn its R rating (substance use and language mostly, the sex is pg-13), so like Blockers it is probably not a family film.
It is however, a found family film. It’s the movie you watch with your best friends, the ones who’ve had your back and held you tight from day one. When the trailer was released, one of my best friends from back home made our date to watch it long-distance together. We hopped on the phone, grabbed a glass of wine, synched our Netflix accounts and had the best time laughing together. He’s the Blair and Erin to my Jenny, and watching Someone Great with him made the film all the more special. We’ve never pooped together over FaceTime, but that’s probably only because he has an Android. I hope members of #romancelandia and the general bitchery give it a chance, I think you’ll be as charmed by it as I was.
Also if you’re in the DC Area come join the Politics and Prose Romance Novel Book Club so we can talk about Someone Great in person!
I can understand the squee about the friendship and the music, but I just couldn’t like this movie. I hated the amount of substance use.
I see it happening in so many films and I don’t understand why Hollywood is normalizing drugs like that.
I’d start wondering if I’m the only one not smoking marijuana, taking molly or whatever…
I agree with -m- about normalizing drug use in a society with a very well-known crisis with opioids and other drugs. I feel the same way about the increasing number of romance book covers (albeit largely independently-published) showing the “hero” smoking a cigarette. I don’t know if these authors are too young to realize the terrible effects or are just taking the easy way out of showing the “hero” is a “bad boy” or don’t think about how showing very attractive people smoking may encourage someone else to take up the habit (I smoked in my first year of college because it was considered “sophisticated” back then and I don’t think I’m the only one who did so for that reason.) I don’t want to be a censor but just think there are better ways to show the characteristics that the [screen]writers are trying to portray with the legal and illegal substance use.
I hated this movie!
From start to finish. The only redeeming quality was the soundtrack, but that is hardly a reason to like an entire movie.
I disliked it not only because of the extensive drug abuse, though that was also A LOT. But the story itself was bland, predictive, and boring.
It’s not the first netflix movie that makes me feel like I watched this screenwriter’s therapy session, where she needed to vent and work out for herself a past relationship, justifying herself, her actions and her decisions, while never making herself look bad. And after I finished it, it just made me think that it was filmed in the hopes that her ex-boyfriend will watch it, and see how amazing she really was, so that he gets the regrets.
Also, the secondary character with mandatory commitment issues only requires a talking-to, and poof! all her issues are resolved! Drove me nuts.
I LOVED this movie. I loved the delicate way her love for Nate is shown – you go back and forth between wanting that happy ending where they get back together, but also thinking they shouldn’t, and then in the end where Jenny lands emotionally is exactly where I wanted her to.
I think I would have enjoyed the movie no matter who they cast, but I really loved it because of the three lead actresses. They feel present and real in a way that you need to flesh out an ensemble story, where you don’t have as much time to go into everyone’s backstories.
You’re absolutely right about the flashbacks being coded in neon, which ties to the neon music festival. I didn’t notice it consciously, but it definitely makes the flashbacks feel dreamy and exciting all at once.
I also think some of it is timing – all my best friends who have watched this movie loved it. But we’re also in the late 20s stage where we”re taking those big life changing steps (moving to a new city, getting married, finishing grad school, breaking into a difficult career, buying a home). And everyone’s taking a different life changing step, but that feeling of knowing a chunk of your life is ending and changing, and mourning that while also turning and looking ahead to what’s coming next, and knowing that the part of your old life you will take into your new life is absolutely 100% your best friends – that feeling is so perfectly captured by this movie.
Only caveat is that there is a lot of casual drug use, so if that’s a sticking point for you, it’s probably not the movie for you.
This is honestly one of my favorite movies. I’m going through almost exactly what Jenny was going through and boy does it feel good to relate to someone.
Does anyone know about a book that is similar to this movie? I’m looking for something new to read and a story like this would be the perfect choice.