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Critics Consensus: Digging for Fire finds director/co-writer Joe Swanberg working from a familiar palette, but in ways that suggest he's taking new and exciting strides as a filmmaker.
Critic Consensus: Digging for Fire finds director/co-writer Joe Swanberg working from a familiar palette, but in ways that suggest he's taking new and exciting strides as a filmmaker.
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All Critics (64) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (41) | Rotten (23)
The movie has been dedicated to Paul Mazursky, the great radiologist of American social interplay who died last year. But Swanberg is still murmuring where Mazursky could speechify, gesticulate, and shout, sometimes in the same sequence.
Conversations drift and weave, as do the people having them. Narcissistic melancholy dukes it out with beer-and-pot-stoked merriment. There is longing. There is foolhardiness.
While you're watching it, "Digging for Fire" may feel slight or tentative, but its cumulative impact is entrancing. Few films about a marital rift make so much of what seems so little.
While it has its charms, Swanberg is tilling soil here that has been churned since humanity began, and he doesn't come up with very much that's new.
"Digging for Fire" is a pleasant escape - an attractively shot, gracefully edited and, finally, emotionally satisfying mystery about the nature of marriage itself.
Unfortunately, for as much dialogue as "Digging for Fire" has, the film doesn't go into much depth about Tim and Lee's true feelings about marriage and their lives.
Digging for Fire is not revolutionary, or even revelatory, but it captures some things that are hard to express, and it did so with a terrific cast.
Digging for Fire has an absolutely loaded cast full of recognizable names, but does nothing with them;
The actors are fine, but the end result feels undercooked, largely because of all the detours and subplots. It's like a miniseries writ small.
The size of that ensemble and Swanberg's particular way of sorta hazily drifting from one half-overheard conversation to the next gives the picture a Robert Altman vibe that's never really been present in his work before.
Strong performances drive thoughtful, mature marital drama.
May not say anything revelatory, but the realization it imparts is no less valuable for it.
There are no featured reviews for Digging For Fire at this time.
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