Review: Drinking Buddies

Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson are flirty friends and co-workers at a brewery (run by an uncredited Jason Sudeikis), who are nonetheless in committed relationships with Ron Livingston and Anna Kendrick respectively. However, a weekend away between the couples sees them questioning just how committed they are, and exploring the possibility that they might just want to steal each other’s spouse, who they clearly have more in common with.

 

I think I can see what everyone’s striving for here, but this 2013 indie romcom Joe Swanberg (“LOL”, “VHS”) gets it really, really wrong by not properly understanding its characters, the situation it has set up, and the genre within which it is working. Swanberg probably feels that his film is about the question of whether ‘drinking buddies’ and/or co-workers can/should become lovers. I get that. Unfortunately, the way it’s done, it doesn’t play out like that at all.

 

What Swanberg, intentionally or not, has done is set up two couples who would be absolutely 100% happy if they’d only switch couples. It’s completely obvious, and completely botched. To get into things further, though, I’m gonna run into spoiler territory, so if you’re crazy enough to be reading this before seeing the film, CEASE READING NOW. COME BACK LATER. WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? SERIOUSLY, I TOLD YOU TO GO ALREADY!

 

If Swanberg wanted to make the point that just because you’ve got more in common with your friend than you do with your partner, it doesn’t mean you should get together with your friend, then he has drawn the wrong four characters to make his point and it ruins the entire film. These two couples come across as absolutely wrong for each other and completely dissatisfied and restless in those relationships. When Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston and Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson get some alone time with one another, not only does it amplify that Kendrick and Johnson and Wilde and Livingston don’t belong together, it shows that Kendrick and Livingston (despite one helluva age gap) and Wilde and Johnson do belong together. They are a perfect match for one another (and it’s obvious between Wilde and Johnson from the opening scene, due to Swanberg’s poor direction of Wilde, who gives the gig away immediately), and the previous configurations were awful matches.

 

If the point is to show that Wilde and Johnson don’t really belong together and that Wilde and Livingston really do belong together, then you need to make the audience believe it. Swanberg fails spectacularly. He has Kendrick tell Johnson that the kiss with Livingston meant nothing to her and she’s not into him. Based on what we see and know about these characters, that is complete bullshit. Kendrick and Livingston are a perfect match insofar as we get no indication as to why they aren’t one. It’s your job to fill us in, Mr. Swanberg. And he gives us a half-hearted argument between Wilde and Johnson as a way of getting out of that relationship that isn’t even remotely convincing, nor organic. It comes out of nowhere and isn’t credible from everything before it. If for some reason I’m wrong and that this idea of buddies not being suited romantically isn’t Swanberg’s point, then he has failed miserably anyway by giving us a completely unhappy, unsatisfying non-ending (That I’m not even sure I understood, as Wilde and Johnson seem to be kinda flirting again). It also does a great disservice to the characters played by Kendrick and Livingston in particular, to be honest. So either way the film is completely botched, staggeringly so actually. Who wants to watch a romcom where the couples are mismatched and end up still mismatched? Because it’s real? Fuck reality, I already live in it. I want a movie. Frankly I think the material is too thin for a feature film anyway, Swanberg is spinning his wheels within fifteen minutes here to the point where he has Livingston tell Wilde she’s dumped twice.

 

In addition to being miscalculated, it’s also a whole lot of nothing much at all. The most frustrating thing here is that producer-star Olivia Wilde is absolutely wonderful in the lead (and looks amazing in a bikini- and briefly topless!), and all three of her co-stars are good enough (and in Kendrick’s case, adorable enough) to deserve a whole lot better than this poorly thought out crap with its boring and mundane ‘mumblecore’ dialogue. The fact that almost all of it was improvised isn’t remotely surprising to me, but surely the beats of the narrative itself were still there on paper, and presumably character details. That’s enough information to see that the whole thing was going to fail.

 

I feel like there’s something potentially interesting here, but Mr. Swanberg needed to let someone read his script over, because as is, the whole damn thing doesn’t make one bit of sense. I get the idea of seeing if you’re right with someone, realising you’re not, and going back to the status quo. But here, it’s quite clearly true that the couples should swap, so it falls apart. Not all best buds should get together romantically, but these two definitely should have, and although not all films should have a happy ending, most in the romantic comedy genre certainly should.

 

What a waste of time and talent, not even my love for Anna Kendrick (which is totally a secret between you and me, OK?) could keep me from getting angry here.

 

Rating: D