Three Aubrey Plaza movies directed by Jeff Baena
Life After Beth, The Little Hours, Spin Me Round
Having reviewed Emily the Criminal (2022), I wanted to do a short survey of films featuring Aubrey Plaza, who has emerged as one of the smartest, funniest actors of her generation, joining Greta Gerwig, Scarlett Johansson and Elizabeth Moss as a woman in Hollywood who takes the reins of her career to produce movies to star in.
I discovered that there are several movies directed by Jeff Baena starring or featuring Plaza -- whom he is married to -- with a company of actors including Alison Brie, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, and Fred Armisen.
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Life After Beth (2014)
Written and directed by Jeff Baena
A shy young man living in southern California, Zach (Dane DeHaan) mourns his girlfriend Beth, who died of a rattlesnake bite on a solo hike. (We eventually put it together that the hike was a date with Zach but that he broke up with her just before it, so she went by herself.)
Her parents extend friendship and comfort to him as they all mourn. But when she reappears at their door, looking little the worse for wear despite having been buried only a few days before, they go into hilarious denial. She's not dead but alive! -- never mind the freshly disturbed grave she seems to have crawled out of. As for his own family, they're even crazier, insisting on a phony all-American happiness that revolves around their elder son, whose whole existence is play-acting at being a cop. (He's merely a security guard for their suburban development, a typical pretend walled estate with a fake name.)
Zach is the kind of person who wants desperately to make everyone happy. Beth's parents want their daughter back so badly they'll put up with anything, and operating at a constant high level of panic that something will spoil this miracle, it's not hard to make Zach go along with it. Beth herself (Aubrey Plaza) remembers little except that Zach's her boyfriend and they're going on a hike.
At first things seem to go all right, though they find that it's not good for Beth to be out in the sun. But gradually things, including Beth, fall apart. We start to hear the sounds of shots in the background, and sirens. Seems Beth is not the only one raised from the dead, only -- by virtue of the recent timing of her death -- the most attractive.
This is a very funny comedy, thanks to Plaza, as well as pros like John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon, who play Beth's parents. But it's also a straightforward action movie. In the very best horror-action films, like John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982), each episode leads inexorably toward the story's end with hardly a pause. There's no pullback of the energy three-quarters of the way through so that the film can catch its breath before the final sequence; it's just strangeness leading to excitement leading to sudden violence leading to panic leading to the wholesale breakdown of society. Plaza grows absolutely unhinged and mad (hilariously, she can be calmed only by listening to smooth jazz). By contrast, every other character is more crazily high-energy than Zach, and Dane DeHaan finds himself playing straight man much of the time. He's fine, but rarely does he really evoke sympathy from the viewer.
Zombie movies -- a genre birthed whole at the hands of George Romero, who theretofore had made only short industrial films, with 1958's "Dawn of the Dead" -- continue to fascinate new generations of filmgoers. They adhere to certain conventions: zombies are a menace to humans, whom they attack and partially consume. Their bites can spread the affliction; if still sufficiently muscled, the newly dead become zombies themselves. But their weakness is that they aren't very coordinated, and they are generally limited to a slow, lurching walk and can be outrun.
They can be neutralized only by destroying their brain -- which has never quite made sense -- usually by being shot in the head. This requirement means that zombie movies feature one particular attraction for the audience. It's not the pleasure of watching the zombies consume others mercilessly, or the weirdly sexual figure they sometimes present, to the doom of some of the stupider characters in a film, or even the notion, very strong in this film, that their resurrection restores them to their friends and families and thereby offers the fully alive humans an emotional compensation as long as you ignore the reality of what their dead loved one really is. No, the main appeal of the zombie movie is its universal fulfillment of a particular promise: that here, finally, is a category of people who can be shot with complete impunity.
Think of the 42% of the adult U.S. population that own guns. Most of those people own more than one gun; millions of people are "collectors" (or "gun nuts" to everyone else) who own a dozen or more guns. I think I'm right when I say that they are probably frustrated that they can't use them for their intended use of murdering others. So the gun lobby invokes language, like "self-defense" and "stand your ground," which provide trigger-happy yokels with justifications for shooting a person of color who does nothing more than knock at their door. Zombie movies offer these people their ultimate dream: shooting others with impunity, in a concerted action to cleanse their town of an infection.
Zach's older brother Kyle (Matthew Gray Gubler), the security guard, is at his happiest when, having been deputized by law enforcement and given a striking orange jumpsuit as a uniform (probably meant for prisoners at the county jail, come to think of it), he can buzz around striking at the zombie menace -- or anyone who moves a little too slowly, or startles him, like a little old lady who does nothing more than say "Excuse me--" before being felled by his silvery pistol. "All I ever wanted to do was shoot people," he says emotionally, just after murdering her. Hit the nail right on the head.
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Dave Franco (l.) and Aubrey Plaza in “The Little Hours”
The Little Hours (2017)
Written and directed by Jeff Baena
Based on The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Set in the Middle Ages in Western Europe, this is one of many movies using the Decameron -- a classic of medieval literature consisting of 100 stories illustrating life and death in the 14th century -- as its source material. (It's a welcome addition to the canon. The 1971 Pasolini version I saw in my college days of the mid-1970s was advertised as erotic, but was dull.)
This version uses sets and costumes appropriate to the Middle Ages, but the dialogue and body language are all of the late 2010s, and this turns out to be a hilarious upgrade. The mood is established early as two nuns (Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci) are standing around doing nothing when the monastery's male servant Lurco (Paul Weitz) greets them in passing:
Lurco: Beautiful morning, sisters.
Plaza: Hey, don't fucking talk to us!
Micucci: You creep! Get the fuck out of here!
Plaza: You're never supposed to talk to us, you piece of shit!
"These girls are tough," warns the priest (John C. Reilly) who celebrates daily mass. He's speaking to Massetto, a young, beautiful man (James Franco) who, fleeing a local noble whose wife he has been banging, takes refuge in the monastery. To do so, the priest tells him to pretend to be deaf and speechless so he doesn't get into trouble with the nuns -- but this being the Decameron, full of bad behavior as it is, the nuns have other ideas, all of them requiring Franco to go, at the very least, topless.
Rendering the Decameron in the profane patois of today, then adding to it some skilled slapstick and a madcap cinematic quality, enlivens the source material greatly. The exalted physical and verbal comedic skills of the actors round off a very pleasurable viewing experience.
Plaza is her usual deadpan character a lot of the time (the local bishop, played by Fred Armisen: "Did you roll your eyes!? You're rolling your eyes!"), plus an explosive temper (see above); at the end of the film her eyes turn soft and she supplies the warmth necessary for the ending. As a bonus, she's also a witch dancing naked at a firey ritual of the local coven.
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Alison Brie (l.) and Aubrey Plaza in “Spin Me Round”
Spin Me Round (2022)
Directed by Jeff Baena
Written by Baena and Alison Brie
This cringe comedy stars not Aubrey Plaza but her and director Jeff Baena's frequent collaborator Alison Brie as Amber, the manager of a chain Italian restaurant (think Olive Garden) in Bakersfield. After nine years of service, she gets selected for a corporate program in which managers are sent to the company's "instituto" in Italy to learn more about Italian culture, cooking, and cuisine. We’ve already seen a credits sequence in which the prepacked ingredients for the company's menu are manufactured and packed on sterile assembly lines into bags of frozen dough, pasta, cheese, and dried herbs. As with all such "casual dining" restaurants in western countries, there's nothing special, or fresh, about the chain's food, so the cognative dissonance of sending its employees to learn Italian cuisine is plain.
And likewise, there's nothing special about the managers selected for the month abroad. Amber, despite having been shown to be a competent manager, is one of several women who seem to have been selected more for their attractiveness than their skill. The others, including Molly Shannon as middle-aged oversharer Deb, Tim Heidecker as know-it-all Fran, and Zach Woods as boot-licking toad Dana, might have been chosen to get them the hell away from their employees. But a clue lies in Fran and Dana’s gender-ambiguous names.
Things at the institute go about as well as you might expect when you gather a bunch of people who know nothing about Italian cuisine to learn Italian cooking so they can go back home and oversee the assembling of exactly no fresh ingredients into the same menu items as always. And there's a wild card: Aubrey Plaza as Kat, assistant to the founder, Nick (Alessandro Nivola).
At least "Assistant" is Kat's title, though her main job seems to be to separate from the group the most likely candidate to serve as Nick's plaything. Things go a little haywire here, not only as a scripted complication for Amber -- Kat is a lesbian who also has designs on Amber -- but for the film itself. If Kat's job is to find a plaything for Nick from among the group, then why doesn't she chose one of the even younger, less savvy participants for his use, leaving Amber for hers?
The film dithers at this point, uncharacteristically so when compared to the previous two films, especially "Life After Beth," which has hardly a slow moment. For the next 20 or 30 minutes, the movie catches up to where the viewer already is, and when it gets back in gear, Kat has been fired, offscreen. I kept waiting for her to come back, but this isn't "But I'm a Cheerleader,"1 in which the lesbian character played by Plaza comes back blazing at the end like Han Solo in the Millenium Falcon. She's just gone, probably off to Sicily to shoot the second season of "The White Lotus."
Finally, after one of the other young women vanishes for a couple of days, Amber is starting to wonder the same thing: what's up with Kat? or with Nick? Why are people disappearing? What's really going on? It's at this point that the film picks up again, with a series of improbable scenes that generate, for the first time, some real surprises and laughs, and the film remains rewarding and entertaining all the way to the end.
I reviewed “But I’m a Cheerleader” (2014) as part of a quartet of early Natasha Lyonne films.