Swingers (1996)
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Grade: B // Worth a Matinee
(Miramax)
Director: Doug Liman. Writer: Jon Favreau. Director of Photography: Doug Liman. Producer: Victor Simpkins. Editor: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Justin Reinhardt. Starring: Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston.
Running time: 96 minutes. MPAA Rating: R (profanity).
It's tough to find a fresh angle when you're making a movie about 20-somethings and their relationships in 1996, since the last five years have seen such a glut of such films that you couldn't throw a rock without hitting one. Young film-makers may be attempting to follow the Creative Writing 101 dictum of "write what you know," but in so doing they are writing what we all have seen enough of by now to know even better than they do. SWINGERS appears at first glance to be more of the same, but it's not really a relationship film. Instead, screenwriter Jon Favreau has created what amounts to a comedy with a National Geographic twist, a charming, almost documentary account of the habits of the North American human male in the wild.
Favreau plays Mike Peters, an aspiring stand-up comedian and actor recently relocated to Los Angeles from New York. Mike is recovering -- very slowly -- from the end of a six-year relationship, and finding it very difficult to get back into the swing of dating. The ultra-cool atmosphere of L.A.'s hidden nightclubs doesn't make things any easier, not does the well-intentioned goading of Mike's friends Trent (Vince Vaughn), Sue (Patrick Van Horn), Rob (Ron Livingston) and Charles (Alex Desert), who force Mike out into a world of party- and bar-hopping with which they are far more comfortable than he is.
SWINGERS is set in the nouveau-hip "cocktail nation" milieu, a retro-Swing movement which has become all the rage at Hollywood nightspots. That setting gives SWINGERS a unique look and vibe, captured most notably in a scene at the legendary Derby with the band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, as well as a unique lexicon (beautiful women are "babies;" a man who radiates success and confidence is "money"). Director Doug Liman seems to be working hard to create a sense of place; in fact, he sometimes seems to be working a bit too hard. SWINGERS opens with Mike and Trent taking a road trip to Las Vegas, then proceeds to bounce from location to location in the name of authenticity.
The authenticity Liman is going for with those locations is an authenticity specific to the time and place where SWINGERS is set, and that is fine, but it is much more winning in its authentic portrayal of the way men act when they are out in groups and on the prowl. Vince Vaughn turns in a priceless performance as Trent, the ladies' man who makes it his mission to turn Mike into an equally potent dating machine; there is a great scene in which Trent and Sue, both drunk, watch Mike trying to pick up a woman (Heather Graham), high-fiving and cheerleading all the while. The dynamics of a group of male friends is presented with a hilariously spot-on realism, with Trent as alpha male directing the behavior of guys who are little like him, and in fact may not not _like_ him. That is another aspect of male friendships which is rarely represented on screen but which is nailed in Favreau's script: men often find themselves hanging out with guys with whom they share virtually nothing in common. SWINGERS gets its' characters relationships so right that it is almost frightening.
It is rather disappointing that so much time is spent on Mike mooning over his ex, given the stronger kick of the male-bonding scenes. Jon Favreau, who looks like a cross between Jay Leno and Steve Guttenberg, is extremely likeable as Mike, and he gets a few great scenes highlighting how uncomfortable he is dealing with women, particularly a struggle with an unforgiving answering machine. The sad fact is that, like in real life, spending a lot of time with someone who does little but whine about his lost love gets to be a bit of a drag. Mike's extremely tentative steps toward getting back on the horse are the frame on which the events in SWINGERS hang, which makes it kind of a necessary evil. The comedy is much richer when Favreau, Liman and the cast of SWINGERS take you on safari, observing a mating dance that is both strange and wonderfully familiar.
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