'Digging For Fire' A Review

Digging For Fire is a dramedy about a married couple over the course of a weekend. They are house sitting and on their first day Tim(Jake Johnson) finds a bone and a gun in the surronding hills which he wants to investigate. Lee(Rosemarie DeWitt) is put off by her husband's lack of motivation and takes their child to spend the weekend with her mother and assigns him to do their taxes. Tim invites his buddies over and they drink, do drugs, and dig for additional evidence. Lee goes out and flirts with a man she has just met Ben(Orlando Bloom) and contemplates pursuing a romantic encounter. Ultimately they reunite and their relationship is the better for their individual weekend adventures.

The narrative is so minimal it is almost non-exsistent. There is no sense that there is actually a problem with the marriage at the film's center and so Tim and Lee's behavior throughout the film is inexplicable and unmotivated. The incredible cast is startingly underutlized. We are provided almost no back story, no information, no point-of-view for any character in the film. Thus we do not care about any of the characters nor the absense of a plot they are engaged in. The metaphor of digging and uncovering secrets is lazily developed and might as well not be part of the film. The conflict of the film seems to be "we wish we were richer" which is cloyingly banal and uncompelling.

Director and co-writer Joe Swanberg is known for using improvisation in his films, it is unclear if that method was employed in Digging For Fire however the film as a whole feels like a bad improv scene. We don't know anyones names, nothing is established, the characters are one dimentional, and the beginning is called back at the end in the hopes that the reptition will manufature some feeling of finality.

A vague plot bordering on incoherent, a disturbing misuse of an excellent cast.

Don't See It.