Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Mumblecore expert. Unlike my friend, who regularly writes about them in her film blog, Audrey Rouget. Before Drinking Buddies there was only one Joe Swanberg feature I’ve seen–Hannah Takes the Stairs, made six years back, in 2007 when the boom of digital cinema was yet to be fully experienced and maximized by independent filmmakers. While Hannah banks on the undeniable talent of Greta Gerwig to forward interest after painstakingly messy scene after another, Drinking Buddies looks like a better rehearsal piece for Swanberg’s gimmicky scene-by-scene improv stint. Quite disastrously so.

For in Hannah, the jerky handycam cinematography is better interplay with the dry casualness of the characters’ everyday humdrum. In Drinking Buddies, where quite an effort in its photography is infused, does this instance become problematic. That it looks nothing like its early film-predecessors, but exactly like how any other American indie romcom would, that it poses a problem for Swanberg’s long-time technique. None of his vision, I’m greatly assuming, translates well to the final product.

In many ways, Drinking Buddies is, after all, still a prettier (for lack of a better term) yet still familiar picture, playing by the same mechanized elements of Swanberg’s previous works. How it is about the intricacies of relationships and an eventual probability of decoupling caused by inexplainable dissatisfactions. From what?–is the proper question, when everything shown is pure surface and facade. Inside the premises of a beer-making factory do these narratives begin to potentially intersect–rightfully so, when two couples begin to swap partners in an infinitely lackadaisical trip to the woods. And so.

Drinking Buddies is, palpably enough, a trite reimagination of the Mumblecore convention–specifically the Swanberg formula, where our slightly manic, sometimes-pixie dreamgirl whooshes off her current romance for another possible one. In this one, Olivia Wilde, as the self-destructive casual drunk, the caricature of tease. And the men that envelop around her tiring aura–especially Anna Kendrick’s boyfriend, revelling in the intoxication of unexciting sin. (2/5)