Digging for Fire (2015)

Tim (Jake Johnson), his wife Lee (Rosemarie DeWitt) and son spend some time in her client's hillside home. Tim finds a gun in the yard but the cops are uninterested. Lee and her son visit her parents while Tim is suppose to finish his work. Instead of work, his friends Phil (Mike Birbiglia), Ray (Sam Rockwell) and others come to hang out. The guys start digging up where Tim found the gun and they find a bone. They are joined by others to do drugs. Tim and Max (Brie Larson) find a shoe and they continue the dig the next day finding even more bones. Ben (Orlando Bloom) rescues Lee from a drunk at a bar.

Director Joe Swanberg continues to make his improvisational indies. The idea of digging and discovery does infuse the movie with an obsessive quality. It works well to keep the intensity up. It does mean that Lee has the lesser half of the movie. In fact, the movie would work better pointing the focus at Tim. There are lots of ways the dig could go. The cops could actually come. The owner could come home early. However Swanberg seems more interested in the couple's relationship.

Fmovies: Just started watching and I'm already upset. This movie starts off with a basic premise that a gun( a handgun at that! ) and a bone was found on a property, the guy calls LAPD, and they tell him "let us know if you find the body otherwise we;re not interested", total BS. Find a handgun alone and any police department will send an officer to investigate, let alone a handgun next to a long bone. The writers making up fiction to go with their story or an agenda to show police apathy about gun control? I don't know which, but fantasy, not even close to reality. Hard to like a movie starting off on a bad premise. I'll watch the rest of it under duress and update this later.

With a decent ending I would probably had given Digging For Fire a seven star rating. But the problem is that there is no logical ending with this movie. Why they do such a thing I don't really get. What's the point of telling a story when the end is unquestioned answers? That makes absolutely no sense to me. If there are questions or mysteries in a movie then give me some answers. Otherwise it's just a waste of my time for watching this. And it's not that the movie was not interesting or so, because to me it was. The actors were good, the story wasn't that bad. It's just the pointless ending. That brings the movie into the category of "movies not worth watching". Too bad.

Digging for Fire fmovies. I don't understand the work of Joe Swamberg. Every time I give it a try because I'm a bit intrigued, but every time I am disappointed. This one has even come to make me laugh out of boredom and I kept raising my eyebrows at every shot or dialog. I don't understand his obsession with white, hip adults in hip environments. A beautiful house in Cali, adults doing coke, getting naked in pools... how indie... (sarcasm). The stories could be interesting or touching or alternative or intriguing but they are none of that. They feel like a failed attempt, every time. I would be interested in the conflict of an adult not really good at dealing with the responsibilities that come with a family lifestyle and being torn between the melancholia of younger days, I honestly would. But not translated in just a bunch of guys hanging out around a pool. I mean, not the way it is filmed here. It needs a bit more depth, something that would resonnate with a feeling we all go through. But no, it's not working at all. Joe Swamberg needs to move on to another subject. Can he see further than his own environment? He has the tools, but doesn't seem to want to.

Sometimes things have to be found. Sometimes they do not need to be found, but stay buried. But even the latter might need a bit of a refresh or redo of sorts. You'll understand once you've watched the movie. A movie that while romantic in some sense also will appall quite a few that will not like where the characters are going or what they are doing, literally and metaphorically speaking.

I'm not sure if it was just the script or something else, but the movie did attract a lot of talent. Some even just for really small roles, like Anna Kendrick and most better known to independent audiences, but still more than just stellar and performance wise really elevating the whole piece (no pun intended). It may be slow and it may not be within your moral values, but it's strong in the end and it just might be able to touch you with the way it tells the way of two adults who have lost their way ...

I generally like the "mumblecore" movement, as well as the evolution it has followed till its current state, a bit more commercial and accessible for general audiences. Yes, they still deal with "the problems of pretty people", but what I appreciate from them is the emotional intensity of the stories and the realism of dialogs which somehow capture big truths about human experience in contemporary world... generally accompanied by indie music and a very natural but artistically satisfactory cinematography. Having said all that, I have to admit that the film Digging for Fire ended up being a big disappointment. To start with, the cast of Digging for Fire includes various of my favorite actors: Jake Johnson, Rosemarie DeWitt, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, Sam Rockwell, Melanie Lynskey and Jane Adams... but they are all absolutely wasted in their roles. The leading couple (played by Johnson and DeWitt) obviously has the most significant dramatic arc, and it still feels like a secondary sub-plot which might have worked better as the support of a more interesting or personal story. The cliché of the married couple in trouble who needs to experiment a crisis to get reconciled or dissolved has been covered in many other films (even from the same movement); in this movie, it seems a hollow essay in the road to something more substantial... a "workshop" in which the main themes, the rhythm of the tale and an ending which ties the loose ends aren't established yet. And I'm not asking for a moral or an epic and devastating "message" about the difficulty of modern romance; just an ending which doesn't feel like an interruption because the hard disk of the camera was filled. In conclusion, Digging for Fire suggests the construction of a bigger narrative, but it can't be more than that... fragments of a character study without any structure in order to bring them context and relevance.