Film Review: "Drinking Buddies" (2013).

"A comedy about knowing when to say when." This is Drinking Buddies. This comedy-drama film written, directed and edited by Joe Swanberg. A chance weekend getaway makes two co-workers realise how much they mean to each other. This realisation, however, may spell doom for their current relationships.

The idea of the film, and especially its setting in a brewery, came when Swanberg received a brewing set-up as a birthday present. By late July 2012, Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, Jake Johnson, Ron Livingston, and Jason Sudeikis were cast in Swanberg's comedy-drama. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and took place in Chicago, Illinois; and Lake Michigan, Michigan. The dialog was entirely improvised. There was no script. Instead, the actors received vague outlines which covered the major plot points, and the order in which certain events would take place. In addition, they were told each day what had to happen in that day's scenes. Furthermore, all of the actors chose their character's names. The actors actually drank real beer during the filming and even did real work for the brewing company.

The film stars Wilde, Kendrick, Johnson, Livingston, and Sudeikis. The performances help raise the film above the realm of self-indulgent cinema to something worth seeing. The actors were allowed to ad lib, and the result is that the characters talk like real people, it's keenly observant about social issues and offers a flippant comical look at relationships for the social media set. How can a movie with such a charming cast and believable dialogue (seemingly taken from the actors' real lives) go wrong? It can't. Wilde and Kendrick prove themselves to be a charming screen presences who manage to make their characters somehow appealing despite her utter self-involvement.

The film delivers clever pacing, solid technique and a deeply soulful performances from Wilde, Kendrick, Johnson and Livingston. Stocked with low-key and entirely believable characters and a sly (but not nasty) sense of derision towards the modern tools that keep us apart, the film is, by my estimation, a solid step up from the director's first flick, and I feel pretty confident that the guy has something even better lined up for his next outing. Smart and engaging, but too many meandering breeze-shooting sequences. Swanberg has an uncanny talent for making the randomness of downtime feel as alive as it seems generationally true. Each film Swanberg does is a little more of an evolution in style and form and the film is like watching a natural progression of talent. Most of the audience will respond warmly to the film for its moments of sharp perception and its stringent, comic-wistful realism. It's a wonderfully goofy movie that was a fun watch. The film may be modest in budget and muted in its ambitions, but for anyone who imagines that truly independent American cinema is dead, this most chaste of romances is a quiet film worth shouting about. Swanberg's movie is dangerously honest about the territorial dynamics of relationships and the confusion we're left with when they end.

Simon says Drinking Buddies receives: