An extraordinary current of pain runs through Joe Swanberg’s new romantic comedy, “Drinking Buddies,” a deep melancholy that turns out to be the driving force of the action, which is the sustenance of the life of a couple—and the incommensurable gap between a member of a couple and a single person. There’s a stern morality at work in the movie, which begins with the irrepressible flirtation of two seemingly kindred souls—Luke (Jake Johnson), who runs a Chicago craft brewery, and Kate (Olivia Wilde), the marketing director. They and their respective partners, Jill (Anna Kendrick), a schoolteacher, and Chris (Ron Livingston), a music producer, will soon learn that playtime is over, that couplehood is a vast but unstable edifice that can be shaken and even shattered—or, for that matter, defended valiantly by a single action.
The key word is “action”: another name for the movie could be “Nobody Says I Love You.” It’s a story in which intentions are nothing and deeds are everything, in which—for all the near-constant, lively, amiable, and witty chatter—almost nothing is said. The characters are passionately active, attentive to their highly detail-oriented work and equally practical in their private lives. They make things happen, and quickly, whether the spontaneous weekend trip to Chris’s lakeside house where the couples’ connections threaten to cross, Jill’s sudden journey to Costa Rica with an old friend, or Jake’s instant ability to mobilize the necessaries and help Kate move to a new apartment. And, at the heart of the active story is the act of acts, sex, which defines a couple’s exclusivity.
In my capsule review of the movie, I liken it to Goethe’s novel “Elective Affinities,” from 1809, in which the marriage of a high-bourgeois couple is threatened by the arrival in the household of the husband’s best friend and the wife’s young protégée. Goethe called his novel theoretical, and “Drinking Buddies” is, too, and Swanberg works out his moral idea in a surprising way.
For most of his remarkably busy career—sixteen features in less than a decade— Swanberg has worked mainly with actors who are at the beginning of their own careers, and his casting has proved as crucial to his own movies as to the cinema at large: he has given early major roles to such actors as Greta Gerwig, Kate Lyn Sheil, and Amy Seimetz. Now, with “Drinking Buddies,” Swanberg is working with experienced actors who have well-developed personae and who have already achieved a high level of success. Swanberg’s conception of the movie depends greatly on his stars’ talents and radiance—even as he reveals hidden facets of their art that make for their stardom.
The movie actor’s personality transcends and overflows the confines of character; it’s a matter both of scale (the movie actor seems, on-screen, somehow bigger than life) and of complexity. One of the privileges of spending any time with experienced and widely recognized performers is that of being in the presence of emotional virtuosi: they seem to live in the world with a stronger, more surprising, more surprisingly expressed torrent of feelings. They seem to generate enormous, and maybe even disturbing, intensities of inner life even in ordinary interactions.
“Drinking Buddies” is a movie of sublime paradox: a quartet of actors—Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, and Olivia Wilde (who co-executive-produced)—play characters living in very ordinary circumstances, and they improvise their dialogue within situations that developed spontaneously in the course of the shoot. Yet Swanberg’s ideas—and he has always been a director of ideas—are so strong and clear that the actors realize them as if within the orienting pull of a magnetic field. I’d argue that the only reason Swanberg’s earlier work hasn’t been recognized for its abstraction is that the intimate scale of the performances focusses attention on their personal element, and this movie is even more abstract in its conception than his prior work.
Here, he seems to be distilling his experiences into a form of wisdom literature, a disquisition on love that emerges in dramatic form. Despite the extraordinarily detailed intimacy of daily life—the push-and-pull of workplace interactions, sexual distance and difficulty, the subtle fluctuations of desire, jealousy, and sympathy that arise in daily life—the movies is as high-concept as screwball comedies of the classic studio era or its modern-day counterparts. (In that regard, the movies it seems, to me, most to resemble are Judd Apatow’s—“Knocked Up” and “Funny People.”)
The characters in “Drinking Buddies” are hardly characters, in the way that they’re conceived in the era of highly-detailed, hyper-motivated TV dramas. They’ve got names, they’ve got occupations. They have almost no backstory and almost no psychology—but the performances, which are improvised in dialogue and gesture, render the characters both intensely, physically, tonally specific and give the characters a spotlit intensity of inner life.
“Drinking Buddies” is a brilliant sleight-of-hand, which I mean in a positive way. Most of the classic Hollywood movies that we love—whichever they may be—are works of magnificent trickery, from the use of studio sets to the painted backdrops of cityscapes to the use of rear-screen projections and miniatures. Though Swanberg’s methods are resolutely naturalistic—he films actors on location, in places where any viewer could theoretically go—he projects the micro-crises of daily life with a big-time Hollywood grandeur. It’s the second movie currently in release—the other is David Lowery’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”—that conveys the feeling of the reconstruction of classic-Hollywood tones and emotions in a handmade style.
In Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game,” there’s a striking moment when the aristocratic Christine de la Chesniest, importuned by the unwanted affections of the heroic pilot who is something of her protégé, asks her chambermaid, Lisette, whether men and women can’t just be friends. The response is a classic: “Friendship, between a man and a woman? Might as well look for the moon at midday.” Swanberg wonders about the same thing, with one notable modern-day complication: the workplace, where men and women are virtually required to be friends, and where, in addition, they are bound together by a common field of interest. It’s as if the movie’s craft brewery were a reconstruction of a movie set, where the work is a creative passion that spills over into after-work hours and has a strong social element. The title of the film suggests that a lesson in love is, at the same time, a lesson in friendship—and that both are a matter of pain to be borne and sacrifices to be made.
