Drinking Buddies shows the prolific independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg at last developing his rough DIY form to something with a passable sheen of professionalism, and he has been blessed with a name cast for his effort. Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston, Jake Johnson and Anna Kendrick appear as variously paired off couples who would clearly be more compatible with reversed configurations, a realization that seems to hit all of them early in the film but does not inspire action toward a reshuffling.
If that sounds like a typical romantic comedy, it largely is, and by adopting more pleasing aesthetic focus, Swanberg likewise appears to have taken on more narrative order. The director’s explorations of millennial life are reconfigured in generic terms: Kate (Wilde) and Luke (Johnson) work for a brewing company making craft beer, where their flirtations spill over into after-work functions where Kate’s boyfriend Chris (Livingston) and Luke’s girlfriend Jill (Kendrick) show up and compound the awkward energy between the friends and coworkers.
Weekend retreats, illicit kisses and a general reassessment of priorities shake up the couples, but Swanberg does not lean too hard on any plot development. Rather, he lets his actors simply improv around the set parameters of their character. Livingston sets himself up as the old guy not entirely comfortable with dating young from the second he starts to wonder if a cellist he saw in a band was being ironic, while Kendrick makes plain that, if Chris wants to date young, he should date her kind of young, what with her traditionalist foundation of relaxing hikes and a desire for settling down. Wilde, though, commands the film, her casual hard drinking stuck between poles of a relaxing beverage and full-bore alcoholism, not yet a problem but nevertheless a means of dealing with how satisfied she feels.
The tiny insights, however, do not hold for the film’s entire length, and soon the wan improv begins to eat itself. One could make a valid case for the actors’ weak improvisational skills lending the film a sense of realism. To be sure, the patterns of the characters’ conversations come closer to real life than the one-upmanship of, say, Apatow Productions films, capturing how a combination of beer and insecurity leads semi-clever people to reach too far in the pursuit of a joke, or for lazy observations to be treated as hilarious by those with a minimal sense of humor. Eventually, though, their plodding interactions simply become listless, and sequences of Luke and Kate dancing around their feelings for each other become endurance tests instead of confessions.
Swanberg’s low-fi aesthetic has regularly come under fire, but at his best, the director has explored a variety of thematic terrain through unexpectedly multifaceted direction. LOL cast a prescient eye on (d)evolving web interaction, a realm of fulfilling social engagements that end with everyone still alone, masturbating to porn instead of finding a partner. Nights and Weekends operated in similar terrain by focusing on a dissolving long-distance relationship, but it reached different conclusions through different moods. Even Hannah Takes the Stairs, with its sound so muffled it requires subtitles, approaches the rapidly overexposed anomie of millennials with an observant honesty well above that of most of its peers.
Drinking Buddies may be easier to watch than all of these, but what it gains in accessibility it loses in resonance. The film’s key moments take the title literally, following social interactions as backed up by copious amounts of booze. Swanberg’s camera holds little to no judgment for this lifestyle, which is not portrayed as a reflection of some cultural degradation but as a simple fact of social life. Such scenes have the same loose, telling aspects of Swanberg’s best work, but wayward, tacked-on sequences of Luke getting in a fight while helping Kate move, the pair exploding at each other over their obvious attraction and jealousies, and the steamroll over such tiny moments. Swanberg is an indie idol, but Drinking Buddies is the first of his films to look like a “Sundance movie,” which is to say that a true independent voice is lost to convention.
Grade: C-
One thought on “Indie Idol Joe Swanberg Devolves Into Conventionalism with ‘Drinking Buddies’”
Could it equally be that the banality of the situation at hand – which isn’t entirely unlike any of Swanberg’s former films thematically – is simply being held up to higher standards and as such is showing its fragility?
I think mumblecore has long since existed on some kind of devolved set of standards. Whilst not bad per say, it’s the kind of thing that works because its low-fi budget and disdain for professionalism reflects a kind of alienated, misunderstood niche both thematically and mechanically. Perhaps Drinking Buddies is a good example of what happens when you begin to try to have your cake and eat it too. It doesn’t sound as if it either warrants nor demands a new aesthetic style to frame the largely consistent Swanbergian story within; in fact it could be that the extra polish shows up more of the cracks with his ideas. As I said, higher standards where standards were never wanted in the first place.