Long past his sexually explicit enfant terrible mumblecore origins, writer-director Joe Swanberg continues his ongoing experiments in honoring the romantic comedy’s conventional satisfactions while expanding its sexual parameters with “The Sun Never Sets.” Wendy (Dakota Fanning) has been dating sedate single dad Jack (Swanberg regular Jake Johnson) for two years. When he decides they should take a break so that Wendy can see other people and make absolutely sure she’s happy in their relationship, a love triangle is sparked. Both bizarre and boring, it’s definitely a signature Swanberg product: performance-driven, sexually (at least putatively) adventurous, full of craft beer.
In drone shots scored to generic indie-pop, Wendy (Dakota Fanning) drives into town, looking vaguely wistful under opening credits — so far, so romcom. But she’s not on the right heterosexual track to marriage and children, which particularly rankles after bestie Lindsay (Debby Ryan) announces she’s pregnant. With two kids and an ex-wife, Jack has no desire for more children or another marriage, but senses that Wendy might come to resent him for denying her both. So, he proposes she take six months off for her to see what else is out there; very reluctantly, she accepts.
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Jack’s unnamed best friend (Lamorne Morris, popping in for a “New Girl” cameo reunion with his old castmate via Zoom) tells him the plan is half-baked, but Jack is unconcerned because he’s in Anchorage rather than his former base of New York City: “It’s a bunch of sweaty guys who smell like salmon. I’m not worried about it.” Mistake! Wendy immediately runs into old flame Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), who literally just got back to town the day before and, no longer a bad boy, begins by proposing marriage and seven children. The man who won’t change anything versus the man who’ll immediately change everything — descriptions that first apply to one character, then another, as Jack becomes desperate to win Wendy back while Chuck’s immature cracks emerge, leaving the lead with two theoretically equally red-flag choices at all times.
Scenery and single salmon joke aside, “Sun” doesn’t particularly show off its novel setting, unfolding in interiors proving Anchorage can be just as generic as any other American city: one of Swanberg’s beloved craft beer bars, a dive bar on trivia night, an art gallery for local painters, spacious suburban kitchens, less tony apartment complexes. Within these confines the main characters register as aliens; Wendy and Jack aren’t just flustered but people who seem to have never been inculcated with a rudimentary sense of social propriety. For example, Wendy is on a bar date she didn’t want to go on when she runs into Chuck, immediately sending the other guy packing; her decision is mirrored later when Jack also splits with his date Sara (Karley Sciortino) in a different bar after running into Wendy. Here, Sara finally raises her voice to express bafflement: “Is this a bit?”
The otherwise strangely becalmed register might make more sense if the protagonists were conceived as unflappable sociopaths, but the film’s theoretical naturalism heightens the inadvertent strangeness of watching people put other through so many stress positions while keeping their voices and mannerisms calm and level. That disjuncture could work if the film were stylized in some way to indicate that we’re operating in a realm of heightened emotional logic, rather than the familiar world of naturalism.
But despite shooting on 35mm, Swanberg continues to pursue a visually inconspicuous style that’s complementarily but counterproductively in line with the performance style. This is a film about difficult people in self-made traps — not unlike the willfully abrasive performers in the work of one of Swanberg’s admitted inspirations, Maurice Pialat, who understood the dramatic importance of externalized volatility to drive his emotionally bruising scenarios. Here, everyone both behind and in front of the camera seems a little too concerned with remaining likable and smooth on the surface. Like its protagonists, “The Sun Don’t Shine” wants to, but can’t, have it all.
