“There’s no part of me that wants to do what I’m doing right now,” Jack (Jake Johnson) insists as he prepares to tell Wendy (Dakota Fanning), his girlfriend of two years, that he thinks they should take a six-month break. He believes she needs the space to figure out what she wants, even when she demands that what she wants is him.
Oddly enough, he seems to mean it, or at least thinks he does. He’s really happy with her. He really has no ulterior motive. He really intends to sit around for the next six months, waiting to see if she comes back or not.
The sun never sets
Bottom line Turn on again, turn off again, and turn on again.
place: SXSW Film Festival (Feature Spotlight)
ejaculate: Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, Cory Michael Smith, Debby Ryan, Anna Konkle, Lamorne Morris, Carly Sciortino
Director and screenwriter: Joe Swanberg
1 hour and 42 minutes
Why then he issues this ultimatum anyway is one of the emotional mysteries The sun never sets. It’s mostly fun, thanks to writer-director Joe Swanberg’s gift for natural chemistry and eye for casual beauty. But just as listening to a friend go back and forth on an on-again or off-again relationship eventually gets old, there’s a limit to how many times Jack and Wendy can flip-flop before the tunes start to get repetitive.
At first, Jack’s decree alarmed Wendy. It is true that she had always thought that she would marry and have children, and Jack, the eldest, had made it clear that he had no intention of marrying again or having any more children. But she’s reconciled to the compromise, doting on Jack’s adorable children with his first wife (Anna Konkle) without a trace of resentment. Not to mention her best friend (Debby Ryan) announces her pregnancy, prompting Wendy to scream at herself in her car, overwhelmed by the sight of everyone moving while feeling stuck in place.
But then Wendy meets Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), the ex-man who ran away. Suddenly, Jack’s surprising request seems like a blessing in disguise – especially since this Chuck claims to be ready to commit and start a family, unlike the “scared little bitch” he freely admits he was three years ago. Suddenly, Jack is forced to confront the possibility that his little experiment may not go as planned.
From there, Wendy oscillates between the family man boyfriend who’s not really her boyfriend at the moment, and the ex who’s not quite an ex anymore. The men oscillate between wooing her and frustrating her, sometimes with comedic effect and sometimes with more bitter effect. At every turn, the three struggle to differentiate between what they want, what they actually want and what they don’t want but are just afraid of not having.
Swanberg’s loose storytelling style, in which he outlines the plot and then lets the cast improvise the lines, is perhaps the film’s greatest asset. Even when the plot’s machinations seem choreographed, as when characters change their minds as frequently and violently as these three do, the actors’ warm, comforting chemistry — built through body language, shared glances, and casual observations — keeps their emotions grounded in believable spontaneity.
Johnson (whose previous collaborations with the director include the exceptionally intelligent Drinking buddies) is particularly skilled at this style of performance. He brings to Jack a playful self-awareness, which paradoxically makes him easier to buy into as a real person: where a fictional person might react to a soap opera-like argument in a bar bathroom with tears or screaming, Jack begins to laugh, able to see the absurdity of the situation for what it is. This sense of humor in turn makes him easy to attract even when, every now and then, he acts like a nervous brat.
Fanning, who has rarely looked brighter despite Wendy spending most of her time in sensible business clothes and minimal makeup, has strong enough chemistry with each of her leading men that we can see why she’d be torn between them, as well as enough of her own gravitas that we want her to be happy even when her behavior tends toward self-sabotage. And Smith is effectively attractive as Chuck, even though his is the least developed corner of this love triangle. It’s a great symbol for Wendy and Jack to fight around rather than a protagonist with his obvious motivations and desires.
All this endless will-they-won’t-they juxtaposition against the natural splendor of Anchorage’s endless summer days (captured on 35mm by cinematographer Eon Mora) and the gorgeous sunlit blond wood interiors (staged by Aaron Bailey’s production) makes it go down quite easily for a while. If nothing else, The sun never sets It makes an excellent case for visiting Alaska and perhaps finding love there — even if mainland transplant Jack is a bit arrogant and describes the local dating pool as “a bunch of goofy guys who smell like salmon.”
If the setting is beautiful and the characters lively, the path the film travels through them is ultimately too jerky and repetitive to take us anywhere that truly shines. It is true that the desires of our hearts can be a mystery even to ourselves, and that solving them can be the work of a lifetime. But there’s a difference between a character who doesn’t know what to do with himself, and a movie that doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with him either.
