DRINKING BUDDIES (Joe Swanberg). 90 minutes. Opens Friday (September 6). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN
If you can’t make it down to TIFF but still want to see a festival kind of movie, consider Drinking Buddies. It’s another of mumblecore director Joe Swanberg’s improvised dramedies about ill-matched characters in awkward situations, but there’s a twist: this one’s filled with movie stars.
Olivia Wilde and Safety Not Guaranteed’s Jake Johnson play Kate and Luke, co-workers at a Chicago brewery who are uncommonly close, to the point where it may concern their significant others, respectively played by Ron Livingston and Anna Kendrick.
When a weekend cottage trip leads to some awkwardness between Kate’s boyfriend and Luke’s girlfriend, our heroes find themselves spending more and more time together – which, combined with their near-constant drinking, leads to some potentially uncomfortable situations.
The bid for mainstream attention means Swanberg has to tone down his usual fondness for graphic sexuality and blunt language. Drinking Buddies feels like a much safer work than his Nights And Weekends and Autoerotic.
But it’s not an uninteresting one, and Wilde is particularly strong as a woman too busy ordering the next round to figure out why she keeps making the wrong choices.
