Drinking Buddies

Drinking Buddies, another one of those improvised movies that I always approach with extreme trepidation, explores all the complexities that arise when platonic friends are attracted to each other. Like Lynn Shelton’s surprisingly effective 2011 film Your Sister's Sister, this is a film in which the director came up with an outline and allowed the actors to find the tone, the costumes, the dialogue and pretty much everything else. The results of movies like this are usually a disastrous and often pretentious mess, but in this case writer/director Joe Swanberg and his cast capture a very specific set of feelings that almost everyone experiences at some point in life. As with Your Sister's Sister, there are some moments that feel contrived, but the truth of the characters' behavior and the palpable feelings they express in words, looks and physical mannerisms feel one hundred percent accurate.