Digging for Fire

Director: Joe Swanberg
Screenwriters: Jake Johnson, Joe Swanberg

Institute History

  • 2015 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Young married couple Tim and Lee have planted the seeds of a family in their East L.A. duplex. Three years after the birth of their son, they’re still adjusting to the joy and pain of life with kid, navigating potty talk at the dinner table, disagreeing over preschools, and putting off doing their taxes. For a change of pace, they decide to house-sit for one of Lee’s Westside yoga clients. Once there, Tim discovers something suspicious in the yard that gets the wheels in his head turning, and Lee, worried that he will become obsessed with digging deeper, decides to drop their toddler off with her mother for a much-needed night out on the town. Sans-wife, Tim invites his buddies over, and a “boys-will-be-boys” scenario ensues, full of drinking, awkward joint-passing, and perhaps getting a bit too close to a girl who isn’t the mother of his child.

Under Swanberg’s direction, Rosemarie DeWitt and Jake Johnson deliver dead-on portrayals of parents on the verge of a nervous breakdown that will ring true to anyone who has ever juggled parenthood with keeping a marriage exciting. —A.M.

— Adam Montgomery

Screening Details

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