Movie Review: 'Digging For Fire'

By Bill Wine

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The central metaphor in Digging for Fire gets far too much attention. From the makers and then from us.

In this marital dramedy, Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt play spouses Tim and Lee, parents of a three-year-old boy (played by the director's son), who are housesitting in the Hollywood Hills at the home of one of aerobics instructor Lee's wealthy clients.

When public school gym teacher Tim finds a human bone and a rusty gun in the garden, he starts digging obsessively, wondering if a murder has been committed on the property.

Then, with their income tax forms looming on the kitchen table while Tim procrastinates instead of hunkering down and filling them out, and Lee away for the weekend with their son visiting family and their built-in babysitters, each gets a taste of freedom – from each other.

The relative staleness of relations between them, on top of the sleeplessness and pressures of childrearing, suddenly have a new context.

Tim finds himself partying with friends and digging, digging, digging, while Lee finds herself sliding towards a flirtation with Orlando Bloom.

Both of them, then, are digging for answers that they might not really want revealed.

Director Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs, Drinking Buddies, Happy Christmas, All the Light in the Sky), an experienced actor and one of the founders of the "mumblecore" movement of independent filmmakers, co-wrote the problematic script with leading man Johnson.

Footage of characters digging is so self-conscious and takes up so much time that it misleads us into paying undue attention to it instead of simply accepting it as you would a prop or a quick reference.

The truth is that the "mystery" plot is trotted out halfheartedly, as if the screenwriters couldn't come up with a better idea.

And the members of the ensemble cast – including Sam Rockwell, Anna Kendrick, Mike Birbiglia, Melanie Lynskey, Chris Messina, Ron Livingston, Judith Light, and Sam Elliott – while perhaps hired for their gifts for improvisation, a Swanberg trademark, were in this case issued far too much improvisatory rope.

Consequently, Swanberg gets very little of consequence from his relatively large and overqualified cast. And, frankly, there's not much else in the way of pleasure coming from a film this plotless and relaxed.

So we'll unearth 2 stars out of 4 for a sub-par, small-scale comedy-drama about marital discontent. Digging for Fire digs a hole for itself that it never quite fills.