EW
What starts off as a promising indie about a couple (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) trying to balance their own needs versus their partner’s quickly goes south in director Joe Swanberg’s latest meditation on aging-hipster malaise. Digging for Fire revolves around the discovery of a bone and a gun while Johnson and DeWitt are house-sitting. He becomes obsessed with digging for more stuff; she goes on her own adventure with Orlando Bloom. The unsubtle message: Don’t poke around for answers you don’t want to find.
AVClub: Early in Digging For Fire, Tim (Jake Johnson) excitedly informs his wife, Lee (Rosemarie DeWitt), that he’s just found a pistol and what appears to be a human bone buried in the hillside near their house. Well, it’s actually not their house—Lee is a yoga instructor, and one of her celebrity clients has asked the couple to housesit for a few weeks while she’s away on location shooting a movie. That only heightens the mystery, though, and Tim is gung-ho to keep digging, see what else he can find. Will he find… fire? Obviously not, and it’s disappointing to realize that director Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies), who co-wrote the screenplay with Johnson, intends the objects found in the hillside to function as a big, clunky metaphor. This is a movie about marriage, and its lesson is decidedly cautionary: Some things are better left buried.
Deadline: Sony Pictures Classics’ Grandma rode into four cinemas over the weekend, giving the Specialty Box Office some much needed pep. The title with Lily Tomlin as the title character was easily the weekend’s per-theater-average champ and one of the summer’s highest limited release PTA debuts. Broad Green Pictures bowed Learning To Drive starring Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley on Friday, receiving a strong lift as it headed into Saturday, while The Orchard lit Digging For Fire in three locations. Fox Searchlight expanded Noah Baumbach’s second 2015 release, Mistress America, into more than two-dozen additional theaters with decent results, while Music Box’s Meru climbed solidly into its second weekend. And A24 added a couple hundred-plus theaters for the fourth week of The End Of The Tour, holding solidly. Meanwhile, Lionsgate Premiere didn’t report numbers for Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way, which debuted via VOD and limited theatrical release. The comedy stars Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots, Jennifer Aniston and Kathryn Hahn.
The Wrap
No one can accuse filmmaker Joe Swanberg of being a layabout: He’s directed 17 features since his 2005 debut “Kissing on the Mouth.” Any consistency he demonstrates, however, has more to do with his output’s regularity than its quality; for every “Drinking Buddies” he directs, there’s a tossed-off, half-baked “Uncle Kent.”
