Swanberg: Drinking Buddies (2013)

With Drinking Buddies, Swanberg moves from mumblecore towards what’s starting to be described as post-mumblecore – films with a mumblecore sensibility, cast and crew, but that exhibit much higher production values, and are aimed at a much wider audience, than seemed conceivable within this loosest of loose movements in its heyday. It’s a transition that’s particularly dramatic for Swanberg, whose career only seems to have become more staunchly mumblecore, more self-consciously minor, over the last few years. Not only did he release some four or five films in  nearly as many months over 2011-2012, but he’s made several of them available for free download, as well as returning to short film for the V/H/S anthology, all of which suggested that a new level of micro-cinema, or online auteurism, might be the next logical step. Within that context, Drinking Buddies feels like almost as drastic an artistic manifesto as Hannah Takes the Stairs – if you don’t count Frances Ha or Tiny Furniture, it’s the slickest, most stylised film in the whole movement, even if it has a typically mumblecore plot, centred on thirtysomethings Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), who can’t quite figure out how to negotiate their workplace friendship with their significant others, Jill (Anna Kendrick) and Chris (Ron Livingston). The cast alone should signal how far we’ve come, in some ways, from the early Swanberg/ Gerwig collaborations – although Swanberg does make a brief, memorable appearance – and  the film very much plays out as a kind of generational reckoning, an effort to come to terms with the mumblecore movement as a movement. In fact, Swanberg’s post-mumblecore often just feels like mumblecore identifying itself as such, as a movement that seemed to subsist precisely on not being named, noticed or even watched suddenly finds itself classicised, canonised, venerated as part of the cinematic pantheon. So there’s something brave about Swanberg’s recourse to more conventional, classical cinema – it admits that his trademark expendability has somehow become inexpendable, the invisibility he strove for has become impossible – just as there’s something traumatically visible about these characters, especially Olivia Wilde, who’s thrown into unbearably crisp relief. The more professional it looks, the rawer it feels, as every carefully composed shot really just yearns to slump down in corners, corridors and couches that no longer exist, aching for all the murky, stagnant digital backwaters that have been blocked up or channelled away, apotheosising mumblecore only to eviscerate it.