Swanberg: Happy Christmas (2014)

One of the risky things about being as hyper-prolific as Joe Swanberg is that your audience can become over-familiar with your style and universe, especially if you work with a small pool of actors and scenarios. It’s a tribute to Swanberg’s sense of purpose, then, that his films always feel peculiarly unhomely – he has an uncanny knack for seeking out spaces that are so anonymous and uninviting that they feel as if they could never become familiar, however much time you spent in them. From that perspective, Happy Christmas feels like either a watershed or a defeat, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, it’s shot in Swanberg’s actual house, giving it a homeliness and comfort that’s quite rare across the rest of his work. Swanberg essentially plays himself, Melanie Lynskey plays his wife, and it also features his baby, who puts in one of the weirdest, most charismatic performances in the film, the degree zero of Swanberg’s many floor-dwellers. What complicates that is the arrival of Swanberg’s sister, played by Anna Kendrick, who’s more redolent of his earlier films – from the moment she descends upon the family, she occupies space in much the same way as Swanberg’s camera, leaving a sprawling slumpscape in her wake, as she collapses out across couches, corners and fold-out beds, finally settling on the incredible Tiki-themed basement as her preferred niche. As might be expected, that causes some rifts within the family, but it also provides their rigid life with some much-needed slump itself – you can almost hear Lynskey’s American accent relaxing back into her native New Zealand twang as her friendship with Kendrick blossoms out into the centrepiece of the film, one of the most beautiful relationships and rapports in the whole of Swanberg’s career. By the end, the family has found a new balance – sort of – thanks to Kendrick’s interventions, but it never feels quite complete or secure either. Like so many of Swanberg’s earlier romances, it's more like an experiment, a study in sustainable slump that never quite reaches its conclusion, never quite figures out the exact dosage of downbeat needed to prevent domesticity from becoming too domestic.