Summary
Bold and red-hot fun, Someone Great is Netflix’s own Girls Trip, giving us a journey of love, friendship and entering your 30s.
Perhaps watching Netflix film Someone Great at 4am, with a reasonably warm brew, after recently experiencing a serious breakup was not the best idea ever. I was expecting a churned-out generic film by Netflix, generating the usual well-trodden script, and in some ways it is, but it was way more impactful than expected. Someone Great is a fantastic drama, interlaced with comedy.
The premise follows a nearly-30s aspiring music journalist Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) who has landed her dream job in San Francisco, and rather than convert their 9-year relationship into long distance, her boyfriend (Lakeith Stanfield) calls it quits. She decides to gather her troops, her two best friends Erin (DeWanda Wise) and Blair (Brittany Snow) to have one last, outrageous adventure in New York City before they part, and also to nurse her broken heart. Someone Great is an aggressive “moving on” story, and from the start, when she decides to rap out one of her favorite songs, claiming “she’s over him”, you know you are in for a ride.
I’ve recently gone through a serious breakup, and what baffled me is how dismantled I felt, at least for the first couple of months. After coming across a variety of TED Talks and scientific research to help me rise into the superhuman being I am now, I learned that a significant breakup activates the same part of the brain as physical pain, so a traumatic one is painfully equivalent to a broken leg. Someone Great drives that sorrow to a convincing and in-depth degree, with an impressive and natural performance from Gina Rodriguez, who manages to convey to the audience the suddenness of it all, and reacts with a series of flashbacks that drives the narrative. You will feel the full force of her pain; Gina somehow draws in the audience.
Someone Great is a comedy as well, and it avoids the romance; Erin is in denial about being in love, Blair is trying to come to terms with the fact she is not in love with her current boyfriend, while also considering a rebound, and Jenny is heartbrokenly reckless. This forms the ultimate drafted dream squad; smoking pot, taking molly and being as wild and vulgar as possible in the best way. Someone Great hones in on the best nights with the best friends, and the Netflix film is the closest story I’ve seen so far that almost matches Girls Trip; it’s easily consumable, and the female empowerment moments are roaring fun.
Someone Great also battles with the idea of leaving your 20s and taking on the dreaded 30s, but then recognizes that a new decade in your life is not all bad. The idea of entering your 30s is born from Jenny’s break up and feeling that it is too late to find a new life, but the theme of friendship takes hold.
Someone Great is the surprise Netflix film of the month, and it is highly recommended.
