Toward the Lite

ALL THE LIGHT IN THE SKY (C-minus) - Swanberg!

Prolific indie mega-director Joe Swanberg can be so confounding. He knows how to elicit amazing performances from some of the most interesting actors around. But he crafts these half-baked semi-stories that require those actors to vamp and ad-lib, to mixed results.

Here he dishes up more thin gruel, an oh-so precious thin-slice of life. The amazing Jane Adams (Todd Solondz's "Happiness," HBO's "Hung") teams up with her cinematic heir apparent, Sophia Takal, in a barely-there story of an aging actress hosting her aspiring-actress niece at her luxurious but sad rental home on the ocean in Malibu.

That's the set-up, but damn if I could find an actual story here. One of the sharper scenes features Adams' Marie and Takal's Faye quite literally discussing the pitfalls of women navigating the aging process, especially in Hollywood. It's one of the only two-person long takes that actually works in the film.

Otherwise, Marie seems stuck in a cycle of tasks and hobbies that reveal very little. She paddle-boards, she makes a lot of veggie smoothies (really, like 3 or 4 times), she curls up each night and falls asleep to inspirational speeches about philosophy and religion on her glowing iMac, and she engages in heart-to-hearts with the other characters one-on-one. Three times she meets up with an expert in solar energy, learning the ways in which scientists harness the light of the sun. Is she researching a role? Who knows. What's painfully obvious is that she is so sad-eyed and emotionally fragile because she's not letting the sunlight into her soul. I'm pretty sure that's the Big Idea.

Anyway, speaking of "barely-there" and how much is revealed, Swanberg has his way visually with his two female stars. Much of the early action features Adams and Takal squeezing in and out of wetsuits and hosing the ocean off of each other, romping naked like a couple of sorority sisters. Marie kneads her "sagging" breasts in front of Faye, like any aunt would, as compliments bounce back and forth between the women (just like men imagine). I'm not sure what Swanberg and Adams (who gets co-writer credit) are going for there besides the obvious observations about gravity and time in general, or maybe he's just pimping, "Hung"-style.

Faye is pretty mopey herself. She Skypes with her scruffy boyfriend back east. (Swanberg goes crazy with the snowy screen shots here, with needless cellphone and video camera images serving as lazy stand-ins for actual direction and cinematography. As a "style," that technique was played out long ago.)

Marie has a fling with the blandly hunkish man that Faye brings along with her, Dan (Kent Osborne, the star of Swanberg's "Uncle Kent"), providing another excuse for Adams to get naked. Marie paddle-boards and flirts with her goofy neighbor Rusty. Their main scene together -- lazing around on the couch after dinner -- induces winces, particularly her insistence that he do his mediocre Jack Nicholson impression.

And that last part is really what's wrong here. There is a germ of a notion here -- cherish youth and come to terms with its passing -- but it just sits on the screen. These are actors who are work-shopping their ideas on camera. Some of them work and some don't. As in last year's "Drinking Buddies," the experiment just isn't compelling enough for us to spend even 79 minutes tolerating such noodling.