The Not-So-Great Relationship in Someone Great

Someone Great premiered on Netflix on Friday, April 19th. By Monday, I had already seen it twice.

Clearly, y’all can guess how I felt about it.

It caught my attention when a tweet by writer/director Jennifer Katyin Robinson appeared on my timeline, reading “I’ve always wanted to see a romantic comedy where the woman chooses herself. So I created one.”

This is not a boy-meets-girl romantic comedy. It’s a boy-dumps-girl break up movie. It’s in all the promotional materials; it’s the inciting incident. And despite what my mom hoped, it’s clear from the jump: Jenny and Nate will not be ending up together.

We see Jenny and Nate’s relationship entirely through flashback: how they met, the first time they said I love you, how they grow, their fights, and ultimately their break up. And it is beautiful. And it makes you want to be in love. And it makes you want to be in love in New York City... And it also shows their relationship is deeply flawed.

To me, that’s the best part.

There’s one scene that clinched it for me: they sit in “their spot” at Washington Square Park. Jenny shows Nate a piece of her writing with trepidation, he reads it and tells her how good it is. She gushes with excitement-- she’s going to get hired to write about the music she wants to write about. And he tells her how amazing she is, how great it is that she knows exactly what she wants and how she’s going to get it… because he doesn’t know “what the fuck he wants to do.” She chastises him for this comment, tells him “you’ll figure it out.” Then they shift to an incredibly cute moment in which they mark where they are sitting as “their spot.”

For many, this was an adorable scene from their relationship that established their history together, gave you some more insight into their dynamic, and showed how much they were in love. And maybe that really was Jenn Robinson’s whole intention. But that’s not what I saw.

You can see it in Lakeith Stanfield’s very expressive face. As she gushes about her plans, about how she’s gonna run her own thing one day: you can see the moment Nate’s no longer thinking about her and her success. He’s now thinking about how he’s inadequate in comparison. How he’s not good enough. How the love of his life is going somewhere with a purpose and clarity that he just isn’t. And he’s happy for her, and he’s mad at himself. And he makes that clear.

Any good relationship will prioritize communication. I’m not saying Nate should’ve kept that feeling inside forever. But in the moment where she was experiencing this great win, he had to turn it around into his own self deprecation. Suddenly it was no longer about him celebrating her, but about her comforting him. And we never see it, and she never says it, but that’s sad. And it makes me sorry for Jenny.

That’s what I love so much about this movie. I love that even in one of her happy memories, we see the flaw. I love that we see these fights in which they yell at each other when they shouldn’t, and she pushes him, and then they later “resolve it” with terrible sex. I love that we see all of these issues.

So frequently in break up movies, someone makes The Big Mistake. They cheat or lie or do something equally terrible. And it’s heartbreaking, sure. But you know what’s worse? When you love each other so deeply and you just can’t work it out. Your relationship has insurmountable flaws that no amount of hard work will overcome. So despite all this love, you have to break up. And it’s so much harder! I’ve been through a breakup in which I wished I would discover that he had cheated on me so I’d have something to hate him for, as opposed to just hating the fact that we can’t be together. Not all relationships end in cheating or abuse or some fatal mistake. Sometimes it’s just not meant to be. And Someone Great shows us that.

Someone Great is now streaming on Netflix.