Digging for Fire
A pocket-sized story of a L.A. marriage that comes to a crossroads which wasn’t on the map. Lee (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Tim (Jake Johnson, who co-wrote with director Joe Swanberg) are housesitting for Lee’s yoga clients when Tim finds a gun and what appears to be a human bone on the hillside behind the house. The discovery sends Tim into a spasm of curiosity, and he’s soon digging out the hill with his buddies (the enormous cast includes Sam Rockwell and Mike Birbiglia) while Lee takes the couple’s son (Jude Swanberg) to her parents’ house for the weekend.
There’s fun in watching Johnson riff with Birbiglia and the others for a while, and Anna Kendrick and Brie Larson show up as part of the house party. But Digging for Fire belongs to Rosemarie DeWitt, whose character seems to be undergoing a sort of slow-burn nervous breakdown about her marriage. (Tim’s failure to do the couple’s taxes is symbolic of a quite a bit here.) Plans for a night with a girlfriend (Melanie Lynskey) fall through, so Lee is on her own until a chance meeting with a man (Orlando Bloom) forces a definitive choice bout her relationship. I liked the idea that Lee is rebelling against the constraints of marriage rather against anything wrong with her own husband, though Jake Johnson makes very clear how Tim’s silliness could be exhausting. Lee encounters multiple copies of a book called “Passionate Marriage” during her evening, and her ultimate response is to shove the book under a cushion while in a stranger’s house.
Digging for Fire won’t appease those who find Swanberg’s films undramatic, and indeed in its execution it’s much slighter than Drinking Buddies or even Happy Christmas. Still, Swanberg has benefited greatly from the involvement of name actors in his films. Rosemarie DeWitt is making a specialty of serene unhappiness, and Swanberg clearly trusts her enough to let Digging for Fire find its own rhythm.
