Drinking Buddies
Drinking Buddies has been available on demand long enough that, by the time I watched a studio-provided DVD, at least one of my friends had already seen the movie. We compared notes and reached immediate, shouting disagreement.
“Are you kidding?” This an objection to my defense of Anna Kendrick’s character. “She’s the one who’s dishonest. She’s the bad one.”
“She’s not!”
In fact, that character, Jill, does tell at least one lie. She makes a thing out of confessing this untruth. Her weepy admission is the sort of event that is, in movies of the heart, supposed to be a turning point.
“I don’t believe her for a second.”
Drinking Buddies being a movie not of the beating heart but of the gabbing mouth. Writer-director Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs) has given his actors a sketch of where scenes start and end but left them to make up most of what comes between. There are silences, and some of them prick, and there are a few important words, some of which gouge. Mostly, though, the point is weightless talk: conversation as act, as mating dance, as comforting ritual, as anything but commitment. Who among these four characters, these easy types (earnest planner, taciturn giver, prolix cynic, soulful flirt), would you pick?
My friend went for the flirt: Olivia Wilde’s character, Kate. It is Kate whose increasingly aggravating tentativeness drives and halts what action occurs in Drinking Buddies. She’s an off-the-rack indie-movie-character mess: irresponsible, emotionally stunted, selfish.
“She’s so selfish!” I yelled at my friend.
“But she’s Olivia Wilde.”
Well, yeah. And Wilde is better than just off-the-rack. She bends an awareness of her physical appeal into a portrait of someone starting to figure out that her usual tricks are getting stale.
Luke — co-worker, best friend, obvious soul mate — sees the con but antes anyway. Jake Johnson, playing Luke as someone for whom figuring out the trick isn’t quite enough, is as good as Wilde. (That leaves Ron Livingston to be a kind of hipster Bill Pullman character, hapless but not altogether wrong but also not right for anybody else here.)
Swanberg’s slack construction leaves too much out — there isn’t really enough going on to provoke real argument. But there’s at least enough to invite you to project almost any relationship anxiety onto Drinking Buddies, and that counts as a certain kind of canniness even when the entertainment ebbs. In the end, my friend would have preferred to watch my free copy, and I wouldn’t have minded paying to see it, and, having agreed on something, we both shut the fuck up.
