Joe Swanberg’s Marriage Material

By Brodie Lancaster / January 20th, 2012 in Film / Memphis / 274 views

Joe Swanberg has officially grown up. Gone are the days of the Chicago-based director—best known for his IFC series Young American Bodies—making films about college graduates and 20-something relationships like 2007′s Hannah Takes the Stairs and 2008′s Nights and Weekends. As the Mumblecore (the film movement in the 2000s you have to thank for the likes of Greta Gerwig, Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass Brothers) pioneer has moved into adulthood, so too have his characters.

In his new film, Marriage Material, Swanberg stars alongside his real-life wife Kris as parents leaving their six-month-old baby (the couple’s son Jude) with their friends Emily (Caroline White) and Andrew (Kentucker Audley) for an evening while they go out. After caring for the child all afternoon, Emily and Andrew farewell their friends and are left to sift through their relationship to find potential indicators of a future marriage-and-kids situation.

A stalwart for non-traditional film distribution methods, Swanberg told the LA Times last week some of the reasons for releasing the film to fans, free of charge, on Vimeo the week of Sundance include; coinciding the release with that of the Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 DVD (you can purchase it here) and sharing his work with new friends and fans he made in November when the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland (a country in which none of his films are available) held a retrospective of his work.

As with all his films, Marriage Material credits its small cast as both stars and writers, reminding viewers of the improvisational and collaborative nature of Swanberg’s brand of low-budget filmmaking. Clocking in five minutes shy of an hour, the film is a delicate and honest look inside a contemporary relationship that doesn’t need wacky characters, a laugh track or other such disingenuous tropes to remind its audience to react and become invested in Emily and Andrew’s story.