Josh Bell
When Drinking Buddies was released in 2013, writer-director Joe Swanberg had yet to work with any actors beyond his circle of mumblecore associates, which included future stars like Greta Gerwig and Mark Duplass, but no well-known celebrities of the time. For his first foray into semi-mainstream filmmaking, he retained his signature improvisational approach, meaning that the cast had to fit into Swanberg’s world, rather than the other way around.
Swanberg was lucky to find a group of actors who could seamlessly adapt to his loose style of filmmaking, led by Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson as a pair of microbrewery co-workers whose work-spouse relationship spills over into their personal lives. Wilde is credited as a producer on Drinking Buddies, but it’s Johnson who became a key collaborator for Swanberg, as actor, producer, and co-writer on two more Swanberg films.
In 2013, Johnson was at a similar career crossroads, thanks to his role as endearingly schlubby bartender Nick Miller on the hit sitcom New Girl. Johnson and Swanberg found each other at the perfect moment, using their collaborations to elevate their artistic ambitions while working out their own ambivalent feelings about success and maturity. As Johnson’s directorial debut, Self Reliance, premieres this week on Hulu after a one-night theatrical release, it’s clear just how important working with Swanberg was for his development as a filmmaker.
“Mature” is not a word that anyone would have applied to Swanberg’s early films, seemingly haphazard chronicles of aimless twenty-somethings, shot on often grubby-looking digital video, with dialogue that reflects the halting clumsiness of everyday speech. Drinking Buddies shares many of those same qualities, with its recognizable stars — including Ron Livingston, Jason Sudeikis, and fellow future Swanberg regular Anna Kendrick — speaking in the kind of awkward, hesitant manner that celebrities typically shy away from even in interviews.
The cinematography and editing (by Swanberg himself) are slightly more polished, but Swanberg still allows his actors to find the scenes as they go along, leaving in the uncomfortable silences and circular conversations, which somehow make the movie feel warmer and more welcoming. There’s a casual vibe to Swanberg’s work that can be mistaken for carelessness, but every offhand remark and pained expression adds up to a vivid portrait of restless people figuring out their lives.
Johnson thrives in that environment, as is clear from the moment he’s introduced in Drinking Buddies as craft brewer Luke, in a scraggly beard and a trucker hat, lugging large bags of supplies and operating heavy machinery. There’s an earthiness to all of Johnson’s characters, and with Swanberg he’s able to bring in personal details that recur, from his characters’ penchant for gambling to their grungy style of dress. In Swanberg films, the line between actor and character is often blurry, and it’s not as easy to get a famous person to embrace that openness.
As Swanberg and Johnson were both deciding how to handle their increased Hollywood visibility, so too are Johnson’s characters in Swanberg films attempting to define the next phases of their lives. In Drinking Buddies, Luke is dragging his feet about his impending marriage to Jill (Kendrick), while clearly reveling in the attention from Wilde’s Kate. He scrupulously avoids crossing a specific romantic line, while otherwise encouraging Kate’s interest, especially after she breaks up with her boyfriend Chris (Livingston).
A traditional rom-com would position Luke and Kate as obvious soulmates, with their strong chemistry and common interests, but Swanberg never goes for the traditional approach. Luke’s journey is about appreciating what he has and making himself ready to take that next step, rather than always eyeing the prospect of something supposedly better. Swanberg takes that journey via his typically circuitous route, and the emphasis on improv means that all of the characters have richer internal lives, as the actors bring those feelings to bear on every scene.
That’s especially apparent in 2015’s Digging for Fire, which once again places Johnson at the center but also features the largest ensemble cast of any Swanberg film to date. Johnson’s troubled gym teacher Tim is in a more superficially mature place than Drinking Buddies’ Luke, with a wife and three-year-old child, but he’s just as unsettled, just as prone to self-sabotage in the pursuit of novel excitement. Here, that comes partially in the form of a flirtation with another woman (Brie Larson), but mainly in an increasingly manic obsession with digging up mysterious objects in the yard of the fancy Los Angeles home where Tim and his yoga teacher wife Lee (Rosemarie DeWitt) are house-sitting.
Over the course of a weekend during which Lee and the couple’s toddler son Jude (Swanberg’s real-life son Jude, possibly his greatest collaborator) are away visiting Lee’s parents, Tim brings in a cavalcade of bad influences as he excavates the yard, discovering what may be the remains of a long-ago crime. Meanwhile, Lee goes on a quieter self-seeking odyssey of her own, meeting a handsome stranger (Orlando Bloom) at a bar and contemplating her independent identity away from being a mom.
Swanberg and his all-star cast create vivid characters even within a handful of lines, from Sam Rockwell as Jake’s dirtbag leech of a “friend” to the returning Kendrick as a party girl who’s also a dedicated medical student. Johnson anchors it all with another nuanced performance as a man who needs to learn that validation doesn’t just come from the attention of hot women or the primal masculine need to dig large holes. There are no climactic revelations in Swanberg movies, but both Drinking Buddies and Digging for Fire allow Johnson’s characters to experience a homecoming of sorts, an earned acknowledgement that they can now better appreciate and understand what actually brings meaning to their lives.
Swanberg and Johnson’s final film collaboration thus far, 2017’s Win It All, is a bit less subtle than their previous two, but it still opts for more subdued, complex resolutions to familiar cinematic situations. Johnson has regressed in maturity here after playing married father Tim, back to being single as gambling addict and serial screw-up Eddie Garrett. Win It All is easily Swanberg’s most conventional film, with the kind of high-concept set-up that could drive a studio comedy or thriller: A gangster who’s taken Eddie’s illegal bets in the past entrusts him with a bag full of money, promising him $10,000 if he can keep it safe during the gangster’s short stint in prison.
Of course, no character in the history of movies has just left a giant bag of money alone, so Eddie quickly dips into it to fund his gambling habit, which just as predictably goes horribly wrong. The difference here is that when Eddie resolves to finally get his life together — accepting a landscaping job from his brother (Joe Lo Truglio), returning to Gamblers Anonymous meetings with his sponsor (Keegan-Michael Key), and taking up a relationship with a level-headed nurse (Aislinn Derbez) — he truly means it, and Swanberg sticks to his low-key naturalism even as Eddie’s situation spirals out of control.
“I like feeling like an adult and not a degenerate,” Eddie tells his sponsor, and that simple proclamation could be a thesis statement for Swanberg and Johnson’s films together: two artists known for their work’s dedicated immaturity fumbling toward the realization that being an adult is actually pretty great, even if it takes longer than most for them to get to that point.Self Reliance returns Johnson to that mode, via a sci-fi scenario that would be too outlandish for Swanberg, but remains grounded in messy character relationships. Johnson plays another reckless gambler who pushes away the important people in his life, with Kendrick as another equally damaged love interest. After honing these themes alongside Swanberg, Johnson now explores them on his own, making the leap into new ambitions and achievements, just as his characters have.
