Drinking Buddies

• Because of humor, strong dramatic timing and terrific central performances, Writer/Director Joe Swanburg’s Drinking Buddies is mostly successful.
• Start with the performances. In 2012’s Safety Not Guaranteed, Jake Johnson proved himself a heavyweight actor, one capable of shifting seamlessly between comedy and drama, sometimes in the same scene. He does the same in Drinking Buddies. Because of Johnson’s soulful performance, we know Luke is a conflicted man who cannot decide what he wants from life.
• As Kate, Olivia Wilde is even better, at least partially because her character is defined simplistically. She is infatuated with an unavailable man, uses her sexuality (and beer) to get attention from men about whom she only loosely cares, and is near emotionally broken. And that’s all we know about her.
• Wilde, therefore, has a difficult assignment; she must give the illusion that her weakly-written character is multi-dimensional. If she fails, Drinking Buddies, as a character centric movie, fails.
• Good thing she succeeds. Through force of personality, subtle facial expressions and reserved emotion, Wilde vitalizes Kate in ways the screenplay does not. She is proof that a talented actor can sometimes overcome a script’s flaws.
• Which is not to say Swanburg’s screenplay is bad. His dialogue is witty, and his pace is crisp. More importantly, he seamlessly combines understated humor and emotional intensity.
• Plus, Drinking Buddies’ wordless final scene is one of my favorite endings from 2013.
• Swanburg’s direction is actually better than his writing. By limiting camera movements, cuts, and other filmmaking tricks, Swanburg allows us to observe his characters, much as we would if they were on stage instead of on screen.
• More importantly, when the camera moves or when he cuts between angles, Swanburg does so for good reason, each time to appropriately increase or decrease our sense of intimacy, and thereby to heighten emotion.
• Which is all the more reason Swanburg disappoints when he removes potential emotional explosiveness. After a camping trip, Chris (Ron Livingston) and Kate have an important conversation. We don’t see it. Later, they have a second, equally important conversation. And again we don’t see it. After that, Luke and Jill (a terrific Anna Kendrick) finally experiment with open honesty, but the scene is cut short, not developing beyond surface level interaction. At times, it feels as though Swanburg is artificially limiting Drinking Buddies’ emotion.
• Moreover, while his movie is fun observational comedy/drama, it has limited thematic application to viewers’ lives. I enjoyed Drinking Buddies, but I am not sure what it means or why it’s important.
• Still, because of strong performances and omnipresent humor, Drinking Buddies is mostly successful and worth viewing.
• Final Grade: B-