Often touted as one of the original kings of mumblecore back in the 2010s, Chicago-based filmmaker Joe Swanberg has taken it easy the last few years. Since his last big film, 2015’s “Digging for Fire,” he’s been busy with shows like “Love” and Netflix’s “Easy,” and even took the time to start a little VHS rental joint out the back of a Ravenswood pizzeria. But for the first time in nearly a decade, he’s back in the director’s chair with “The Sun Never Sets,” a curious, complicated relationship dramedy that sheds much of the meandering of his mumblecore origins without losing its messy, honest heart.
The story, at its core, circles around your classic love triangle, though approached in a kind of r/nonmonogamy sort of way. Set in Anchorage, Alaska (captured by cinematographer Eon Mora in gorgeous 35mm photography that sets such personal tumult amid snow-capped mountains; it’s the best one of these kinds of movies has looked in a while), “The Sun Never Sets” centers on Wendy (Dakota Fanning), a construction manager happily settling into a steady relationship with jittery divorcee Jack (Jake Johnson, Swanberg’s constant muse for the last decade). She professes happiness as she settles into his life as a divorced dad, but there’s a wanderlust to her: The opening scene sees her staking a claim to buy a boat from an interested seller, so she can recapture her childhood adventures fishing with her late father. What’s more, her last remaining childless friend reveals that she’s pregnant, which hits a nerve in that screaming-silently-in-your-car movie scene kind of way.
Sensing that restlessness and (in his dunderheaded mind) wanting to do the right thing, Jack practically forces Wendy to take a break from them for a few months so she can play the field and figure out if the settled life he offers is what she truly wants. “I don’t want you to wake up in eight years and hate me,” he professes. She’s perplexed and doesn’t want to, but she acquiesces and starts going on a few unsatisfying dates. It’s during one of these duds, however, that she spots Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), an old flame of hers, who’s moved back into town. Sparks fly immediately, and before she knows it, she’s ditching her date and spending the weekend at his place. Where Jack offered goofy dad-bod stability, Chuck is slick and exciting and adventurous; not only that, as soon as Jack faces the possibility Wendy might actually find someone she wants more, he starts to do some spiraling of his own. And stuck in the middle is Wendy, torn between two possible futures, with no idea what she wants or how to reconcile them.
The film’s title refers most literally to Alaska’s long, bright days, but it also gestures at the liminality the film’s characters experience. In the emotional world Wendy swims in, no door is closed, no avenue truly final. But because this thorny situation (spurred by Jack’s own self-destructive ego) has opened a Pandora’s Box of polyamory, that sense of possibility also gives way to possessiveness and no small amount of emotional pain. Swanberg’s script (aided, of course, by his cast’s dextrous skill with improvisation) delves into these painful romantic gray areas, a trio of people essentially falling ass-backward into an open relationship without doing any of the work beforehand. He’s always been ace at letting his actors breathe and talk through a scene; “The Sun Never Sets” is full of these, Mora’s camera capturing the butter-thick tension that can lie anywhere from domestic spaces to a bar trivia night.
Johnson is especially joyful to watch here, capturing the flop sweat of an essentially good-natured but impulsive guy who’s in way over his head and trying desperately to roll with the punches even if he’s not emotionally ready for it. He constantly tells himself (via Zoom calls with his best friend, played by Johnson’s former “New Girl” costar Lamorne Morris) that he’s fine with everything, that he has it under control; his fallibility betrays him at every turn, frustrated at having to lie in the bed he didn’t realize he was making. He’s a little too attuned to his emotional world, which leaves him second-guessing everything (including an impulsive relationship he starts with the radiant Karley Sciortino, blissfully unaware that she’s a revenge rebound). “I cannot believe I did this,” he sighs during one of his many desperate meets with Wendy to win her back; Johnson wears his insecurities on his sleeve in a very relatable way. Smith, for his part, does yeoman’s work, selling the seductiveness that Wendy might see in him, and the avoidance that might have pulled them apart to begin with.
But it’s Fanning’s show through and through, a performance powerful in its unshowiness. Cast amid the whims of an insecure boyfriend and desperately trying to put ground underneath her feet, there’s often a dazed and confused look in Wendy’s eyes as she flits between one path for her life and another. In Jack, she sees the steadiness of a financially secure, emotionally mature partner; in Chuck, there’s someone who might actually want to go on the boat she wants to buy with her. Does she pick the cozy ending with a man who has a life pre-planned out for her, or does she want the chance to build something herself? Swanberg and his cast explore these questions in patient, raw-nerve conversations and confrontations, sitting in the discomfort of stalking your ex to a bar or texting sweet nothings to one person while lying in bed with another. Fanning is the conduit for all of this, spinning around in circles wondering what she wants, and lashing out when wandering down one path leads to discomfort from the person offering the other.
The love triangle movie is nothing new; “The Sun Never Sets,” thankfully, finds new paths to tread. Not quite the romantic competition of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” not quite Gregg Araki’s throuple-positive rom-com “Splendor.” There’s no happy ending where everyone just decides to get along and share; life is a bit too complicated for that. But in squirming against the discomforts that lie between comfort and possibility, Swanberg delivers a beautiful comeback.
