Butler's Cinema Scene

Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson

“DRINKING BUDDIES” My rating: C+ (Opening Sept. 13 at the Alamo Draft House)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Drinking Buddies” is not a romantic comedy, despite the presence of some usually-funny players and a setup that sounds like classic rom-com.

Instead, Joe Swanberg’s largely-improvised feature is a gentle, unforced study both of several  authentic-feeling characters and of a way of life.

Kate (Olivia Wilde) is the events planner at a Chicago craft brewery. Her best bud is one of the brewers, Luke (Jake Johnson).

Both are in romantic relationships with other people (she with a recording engineer played by Ron Livingston, he with a special ed teacher played by Anna Kendrick). But it’s all too obvious that Kate and Luke are cut from the same slacker cloth.  They banter on the job, share lunch, and hang after hours.

Their idea of a good time is going directly from the brewery to a bar to suck down pints, play pool and talk – although their repertoire of discussion subjects seems pretty limited. They may have intellectual inner lives, but they’re not indulging them in public.

Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston

We viewers conclude early on that our two main characters are with the wrong people.  Livingston’s Chris is a wine drinker, fer chrissake, and something of a neat freak (he insists that Kate use coasters so as not to ruin his furniture with her sweating beer bottles).  Similarly, Kendrick’s Jill is getting bored with endless evenings of pointless drinking and banal conversation.

From a distance “Drinking Buddies” might be mistaken for a study of alcoholism – except that these people never get mean or violent no matter how many draws they put away.  Nobody gets fall-down blotto…they’re into happy buzzes.

Precisely what is  the subject of the film is a bit elusive.  We’re caught up in the charisma and affability of the two lead performers (Johnson is  loveable with a toothy smile always breaking through his bushy beard, and Wilde shows up with a minimum of makeup or fashion model affectation) . For a while, at least, it’s enough just to hang out with them.

But “Drinking Buddies” reaches a point where it needs more than improvised dialogue.  That’s fine for establishing a community of co-workers who are at ease with one another. But at some point we expect – if not dramatic fireworks – at least a sense that the story is heading somewhere.

And it doesn’t. It treads water (or beer) and then ends inconclusively.

This may be true to life, but it’s not particularly satisfying.  The result is that even at a terse 90 minutes, “Drinking Buddies” feels too long.

| Robert W.  Butler