Joe Swanberg’s first feature in six years has a mechanism, not a plot. Wendy (Dakota Fanning) drives a bulldozer in Anchorage; Jack (Jake Johnson) is a divorced money manager who will not marry or have more children, and who insists on a six-month break so she can date other men and confirm she wants life with him — on his terms.
What follows is precise:
- Wendy grudgingly dates a doting friend, locks eyes with an ex (Cory Michael Smith), and within days they are a couple again, leaving Jack scrambling to undo the plan he imposed.
- The stakes are slight in the big picture and colossal for the principals, and Brody says Swanberg turns every turn “like a twist of a knife.”
- Swanberg’s method is unchanged — improvised performances over scene functions made specific and conspicuous — but this film floods the architecture: characters get only the traits the drama needs, “like pegs in slots.”
- Eon Mora’s cinematography is so plain and open as to be “practically a degree zero of pictorial neutrality”; the story has no shadows, and it is hard to imagine these people off-screen.
Brody’s judgment is admiring and a little double-edged: an extraordinary film masquerading as an ordinary one, an experimental film that views its situation under a microscope. Its subject is Swanberg’s philosophical view of love — that people are drawn together by something fundamental in the bedrock of selfhood, transcending whatever traits they share.
His reservation is the one worth keeping. Brody thinks that is not obviously true, and that some surface traits run straight to identity. Swanberg’s early films took that distinction seriously — Hannah Takes the Stairs has a scene of young screenwriters arguing about the Bush administration and whether to put it in their work. The Sun Never Sets exists in an atemporal, ahistorical void.
Hence the line that sticks: better to have seen it than to see it, better to think about it than to experience it.