This attention to dramatic framework is a logical extension of Swanberg’s prior body of work. All of his films are largely rooted in improvised performances—he creates stories, plots them out into scenes, and then grants the actors a large margin of freedom in inventing dialogue and stage business. It’s what he did when working with not-yet-professionals and utterly untrained actors in his first films; it’s what he also did with “Drinking Buddies,” “Easy,” and everything in between; and he does it in “The Sun Never Sets,” too. In order to make the method work—which is to say, in order to give the actors guidelines tight enough to shape their performances to a sharp point—he has always made each scene’s function in the plot specific and conspicuous. From there, his casts’ inventive performances push his movies in two directions, bringing a filigree of detail to the story that Swanberg might never have anticipated, and uniting the actors with the characters they play. But “The Sun Never Sets” shifts the balance of these elements and thus gets striking new results from the cast.
“The Sun Never Sets” elides characterization. It rarely suggests what might be happening in the inner lives of its characters; it gives few clues about their interests, tendencies, ideas, or principles, and only grants them those traits which fit the logic of the drama like pegs in slots. The story has no shadows; the characters exist as what they are onscreen, and it’s hard to imagine them off it. This extreme foregrounding of character in terms of action endows the cast with a retrospective air of typecasting, in a positive sense—the actors seem made for their parts, coalescing with their characters temperamentally.
Considered from one angle, the movie is superficial and conventional, zipping heedlessly between the characters without fretting about point of view, creating scenes that don’t so much illuminate characters as simply push the story along. For instance, the film starts with Wendy’s visit to a marina in the hope of buying a particular boat; it quickly turns out to be something of a sticking point with Jack, who’s not an outdoorsman and has no desire to join her time aboard it. In the next scene, at an outdoor gathering, her friend Lindsay (Debby Ryan) announces that she’s pregnant; the elaborate surrounding bustle all but evaporates beside the disclosure that the two friends have long planned to get pregnant around the same time. Wendy laments to Jack that she has lost, as she puts it, her last friend who can join her spontaneously on fun adventures. The fault lines are thus quickly drawn, and the increasing stress prompts Jack to impose, that very night, his strategic pause on the relationship.
In most other films, these narrow constraints would be unequivocal failings. But in “The Sun Never Sets” they’re features, not bugs. The perspective sustained throughout isn’t that of any one character but that of Swanberg himself, and the movie proceeds as if he’s not so much suspensefully turning over its cards one by one but, rather, bringing out, with a dazzling clarity, its conceptual ideal from behind the tangle of events. Swanberg is focussed on his theoretical vision of modern romance—and forgive me for not spoiling it, but the ironies are whiplash-keen and psychologically audacious. The effect is to make the story feel almost like an allegory, abstracting just about everything that it touches—characters, settings, décor, dialogue. It is as if he designed the situation at the center of the movie to show that the traits of its characters are irrelevant to the results.
“The Sun Never Sets” is, so to speak, an experimental film—it looks at its situation as if under a microscope. It’s an extraordinary film masquerading as an ordinary one, a conventional romance on the surface that, on reflection, reveals Swanberg’s philosophical view of love: that people are drawn together by something fundamental, deep in the bedrock of selfhood, that transcends whatever manifest traits they might have in common.
I’m not sure that this idea holds as a general rule. I think that some seemingly surface-level character traits have a direct pipeline to the magma of soul and identity; other traits don’t. One of the most interesting and useful things that romantic drama, classic or modern, can do is to distinguish essential characteristics from trivial ones. Swanberg’s earlier films took such distinctions seriously. For instance, an exemplary scene in “Hannah Takes the Stairs” involves young screenwriters’ criticism of the Bush Administration and their discussion as to whether or not to include it in their work. By contrast, “The Sun Never Sets” exists in an atemporal, ahistorical void. Those early films were among the prime examples of what was then dubbed mumblecore: personal films, raw and free, made with self-conscious attention to performances emerging from real lives and converging with actors’ identities—and ideas.
