Swingers

With Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston, Patrick Van Horn, Alex Desert
Written and Directed by Jon Favreau
by Jamie Kiffel

Will Mike’s ex-girlfriend call him? Will he receive the message when she does? Will he ever have sex again? Will I care?

Mike, a nice but neurotically insecure guy, whimpers, sighs and repeatedly rakes his body across the jagged issues of his love life. He sulkily resists anxious invitations to emulate his friends, a pack of foamy-mouthed woman-hunters who are certain they know the recipe for fast and courteous poontang. This is not much of a storyline, especially when much of its development is spent allowing Mike, the once-described “PG-13 hero who everyone really hopes is going to make it,” to put his personal kibosh on every sexual opportunity that rears its foolhardy head. He reduces a drunken and willing trailer park actress to tears by detailing,ad nauseam, his inability to kickstart his life. He leaves an excruciating series of messages on the machine of a woman he met moments ago in a bar, lengthily explaining how this new relationship is moving too fast for him. Mike does not move me to sympathy. He moves me to shove an iron supplement into the VCR. One element valiantly saves Swingers from being a bleak wash of whiny tears, however. It is the very “beautiful baby” hunter whom Mike works hardest to resist becoming. Somehow, Trent, as played by Vince Vaughn, wrenches his most morality-wringing comments into Brylcreem-slick and Hollywood-gleaming charm.

Following a dull opening conversation about Mike’s failed relationship, his surrealistically empathetic answering machine snared my interest by playing the first comments from Trent. “Hey, gorgeous,” he begins, already hinting at the sexual meltdown radiating from the core of his shallow self. Quickly harnessing the whole script and reaping Mike’s fate in the process, Trent reels his gelatinous friend onto the road to Las Vegas. As Mike is the dragging factor, the convincing scene is a bit longer than my patience appreciates, but I am still captivated by Trent’s enthusiasm about being “dressed like the money, like the bomb.” Vaughn’s phrasing spreads like double chocolate icing on full-fat cheesecake. He draws in a cocktail waitress and “one of her beautiful baby friends” with the lure of a fifty cent piece and a low-lidded grin. “She wants to party! She wants to!” he bubbles, and satisfyingly, he gets away with it.

Despite the painful sexual dearth provided by Mike, the movie continues to have worthwhile moments. Untraditional point-of-view shots, such as that of Trent urinating by the side of the road as Mike talks at his back, or the shot of Mike and Trent as taken from the viewpoint of their car’s radio antenna, make gratuitous chatter sometimes captivating. There are many bare bread moments (filling but tasteless), such as when we see Mike and his friends discuss how movie makers steal from each other, then cut to a spoof of the slow-motion walking scene from Reservoir Dogs. The idea is clever, but the scene lasts too long and departs from the storyline. There are also long conversations about the difficulty of getting jobs in Hollywood, which might be funny to the director, but does not ring my commiseration bells.

Talkiness aside, there are some conversational gems that far outshine the dry times, even if only in retrospect. If for nothing else,Swingers is bound to be remembered and quoted for Trent’s brilliant seduction speech, where he convinces Mike that he gnashes his giant fangs and clicks his lethal claws, but he cannot “kill the bunny” (catch a woman) because he cannot see his own arsenal. Trent also delivers a fantastically drunken, jilted scene where he piteously stands on a truck stop table and shouts, pelvis thrusting, “Mikey’s all grown up now! He don’t need us anymore!” When Mike finally appears to be coming into his own, Vaughn’s performance makes it almost impossible to wholly congratulate Mr. PG-13 without feeling sorry for the slick-talker who first greased his wheels.

Under close scrutiny, Swingers is full of patchy spots. In spite of this, its strong points, mostly embroidered by Vince Vaughn, hold it together tightly enough to create one respectably flashy, cinematic zoot suit that undeniably shouts “money.”