Love Triangle Drama Is A Triumphant Return For Director Joe Swanberg

Of the filmmakers to come out of the mumblecore movement of the early 2000s, it is Joe Swanberg whose work still retains its core essence. Despite growing budgets and more recognizable actors, his work of the late 2010s is defined by a devotion to naturalism and the intricacies of coupling, much of which he has made indelible through largely improvised scenarios and a refined understanding of how an edit tells the tale. In the nine years since his last feature (Win It All), Swanberg’s acute sense of authenticity has only grown stronger, like a painter perfecting their brushstroke.

The Sun Never Sets finds Swanberg playing around with a much larger budget than he typically works with. Shot in the snowy valleys of Anchorage, Alaska and its surrounding areas, the film has a sense of grandiose wonder. Sweeping aerial shots of the white-capped mountains and rippling lakes suture together scenes of incisive honesty; there’s an inherent, and decidedly beautiful, contrast between these person-to-person meetings. The uncertainty of adult life feels unnatural against the heavy certitude of the landscape.

The Sun Never Sets’ Nuanced Drama Is Powered By A Career-Best Dakota Fanning

The film’s plot operates on a similarly small scale to Drinking Buddies, Swanberg’s 2013 ménage-a-quatre, except here he focuses his attention on Wendy (Dakota Fanning), an early-thirties construction site manager, whose good-natured devotion to “living in the moment” may be preventing her from understanding her own predicaments. Perhaps she worries that, if she zooms out, she’ll have to admit her own frustrations with life. Or, perhaps she is naturally guarded against projecting too far into the future, for fear of missing out on the present.

Whatever the case, it is her older boyfriend, Jack (Jake Johnson), who more or less forces her to take stock of what she really wants out of life. A single father of two children, the wealth manager volunteers as the school’s basketball coach. The couple is well-established and loving, Wendy has a strong bond with the kids, and all of them get along just fine with Jack’s ex-wife (Anna Konkle). All is well.

But, privately, Wendy is bottling up a mountain of frustration and confusion. The mere mention of her friend’s (Karley Sciortino) pregnancy causes her to hole up in her car and scream. She wants kids and marriage; Jack has already been there and won’t do either again. And, seemingly out of a genuine concern for his girlfriend’s future happiness, he suggests something radical: They break up for six months, Wendy takes the time to date others, and both of them consider whether this is the long-term life they want to live.

Wendy hates the idea of a forced rumspringa, but it doesn’t seem like she has much of a choice, and so gives it a college try. On just her second or third date, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), who has returned to Anchorage to work as a tourist pilot. The reunion is immediately packed with unresolved sexual and emotional tension. In this and in other ways, Swanberg interrupts an otherwise grounded reality with little moments of magic, in much the same way real life works.

It is Chuck’s reappearance that makes Jack realize he may have made a mistake in a moment of misguided altruism, and suddenly Wendy finds herself being thrown into an inadvertent experiment with polyamory. Not content to leave behind Jack just yet, and not fully sure if Chuck has sufficiently changed since their breakup, she is caught between two very different worlds. While the younger Chuck espouses a desire for marriage, children and a life outdoors, his financial insecurity has them both rushing head-long into a joint living situation neither seems particularly ready for. And while Jack’s cash flow and wonderful kids make him all the more desirable, he is functionally stubborn and controlling.

Appreciably, The Sun Never Sets presents characters who are thoroughly complex, thereby eschewing an easy 1:1 comparison between two wildly different partners. But it isn’t as simple as one person providing one thing while another provides something else. Life, relationships, and sex are all much more nuanced than shopping lists, and so is Wendy’s understanding of what she needs versus what she thinks she should strive for.

Of course, considering that Swanberg operates through heavy improvisation, a ton of credit is due to Fanning and Johnson, the latter of whom counts this as his fourth collaboration. This may well be Fanning’s best performance to date, an intricately laced characterization of someone who is as filled with determination and dignity as she is by indecision. As Wendy, Fanning has a special way of presenting someone that can be both open and closed in equal measure: smiling through difficulty, forceful and righteous when angry, light and airy when experiencing joy.

Ultimately, The Sun Never Sets is her film, and she is such an infinitely pleasurable actor to watch that everything else goes down smoothly (though it is frankly a little hard to buy into the idea that she is a construction worker). Swanberg, who wrote, directed and edited the film, as is his wont, gives us an uncommonly tender portrait of an intersection we all must find ourselves facing at least once. The sun that never sets is the one that forces us to continuously re-evaluate our own lives. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s warm underneath its rays.