THE INDISPENSIBLES - #17: SWINGERS
You know how they say “Life imitates Art”? Well what about “Art imitating life”?
I first saw Swingers at my local independent cinema. It was in the tale end of the summer of 1997. My cinema-loving high school best friend, ‘Cecil’, and I were reconnecting with movies over this period and it was really the time that, in terms of our ‘love’ of movies and ‘understanding’ about different ‘types’ of movies, we both came into our own. It was the year of the over-inflated pieces of big budget mediocrity like The Lost World: Jurassic Park and outright disasters like Speed 2: Cruise Control or Batman & Robin. In an attempt to counter all the poor stuff we were seeing for the price of our ticket, ‘Cecil’ and I started hunting out cinemas that were showing something different – you know, the types of movies that only ever got a small column of a mention in the monthly movie magazines? As a result we saw the likes of Grosse Pointe Blank, Good Will Hunting and Swingers. Movies that literally blew us away!
Blow me away Swingers might well have done, but it did slip my mind as time went on. It was only a few years later that I came across it again and found myself watching it three times, I kid you not, back to back, staring open mouthed at the screen:
I’d moved away from home to commit to both the job I’d always dreamed of doing and to a woman I had entered into my first ever, long term romance with. Things were going great for a while until one day I started to struggle in the job and, at the same time, my girlfriend announced that she was leaving me for a work colleague she had been having an affair with for the last few months. I sank into a state of depression and awoke months later to find myself under the wing of my popular, better looking, girl obsessed work mate, Andy. He saw the cure to all my ills as being constant night outs and/or taking a different girl to bed every night.
As time went on, I found myself – one evening – stood in one of the tackiest nightclubs ever, spouting a load of lies to some woman that, normally I wouldn’t have so much as passed the time of day with, but because she had a tattoo on the base of her back (something Andy and I had universally christened as a “tramp stamp” long before Vince Vaughn – now there’s a link – coined the phrase in Wedding Crashers) I had deemed her ‘worthy’ of taking back to mine and performing drunken but mildly adequate sex acts upon. I suddenly realised that I didn’t even know who I was anymore. The guy that was stood there, listening to this woman talk about how good she was at oral sex, this most certainly wasn’t me!
I found myself staggering out of the club, mid-conversation, and going home to bed alone where I stayed for days on end, utterly depressed at how my life had turned out. Swingers turned up on TV late one night. I watched it and could not believe what I was seeing. Here was a film that was about exactly what I was feeling. The character(s) were saying exactly the same things that I was thinking and some of them were going through the exact same things that I was going through right there and then in my own life. I went out the next day and bought the DVD, took it home and kept rewatching and rewatching it.
However, if Swingers seems at all a little autobiographical to me, spare a thought for writer/star Jon Favreau. They say you should write about what you know, well Favreau obviously did. He was struggling to make it as a stand up comedian/actor and just about surviving on tiny bit parts in TV movies of the week. Following the break-up of his long term relationship, Favreau got dragged under the wing of his wild, girl-chasing best friend, Vince Vaughn, who he met on the set of Rudy and when they weren’t going around the best parties in LA “building contacts” and “chasing skirt”, Favreau, Vince and their friends (all out-of-work actors) would sit around in all-night coffee shops, slating other actors and friends who had work.
In the wake of the independent movie scene in the early nineties rising to it’s [then] phenomenal status, following the debuts of the likes of Kevin Smith (with Clerks), Quentin Tarantino (with Reservoir Dogs) and Robert Rodriguez (with El Mariachi), Favreau decided to sit down and write a script about the “reality” of life in LA as a struggling actor looking for love and create enough decent parts for he and all of his friends. The plan was to keep the screenplay simple enough for Favreau to raise enough money for him to go out and shoot it himself. The plot of Swingers was born:
A loosely knit group of friends hang out in Los Angeles and hope to make it big in the entertainment industry. Mike (Jon Favreau) wants to be a stand-up comic but has no job prospects. He mourns Michelle, the girlfriend he feels he left behind back East but who, in reality, cruelly dumped him. Trent (Vince Vaughn), Mike’s loud-mouthed, super-confident, obnoxious best friend, spends long hours with him in a variety of diners and coffee shops, advising him that you cannot get a woman to come back unless you’re willing to forget her, by which time of course, you don’t care if she comes back.
The movie follows Mike, Trent and a shifting cast of friends through several days, during which they drive through the Hollywood Hills looking for parties at which Trent promises scores of women. They play computer games and go looking for hot clubs (“All the cool bars in Hollywood have to be real hard to find and have no signs”). They try, somewhat unsuccessfully, to pick up girls (in one scene Mike claims he’s in showbiz, but the woman he’s chatting up remembers seeing him in Starbucks, picking up an application form). In fact, the guys pretty much do anything and everything except the one thing that could “make them” – i.e. go on auditions.
Once the screenplay for Swingers was finished and he’d shown it to all his friends for whom he’d based characters on, Favreau naively thought that some Hollywood big shot would come along and throw money at them. It didn’t happen. In fact, hype was so low on the script and Favreau was struggling so badly to get it seen by the right people, that he and his friends took to hiring out venues and doing staged readings of the screenplay for anyone and everyone in the industry.
Members of the audience for one such staged reading were Nicole Shay LaLoggia and Victor Simpkins, two people who were struggling to make it as producers in the industry as much as Favreau and friends were struggling as actors. They saw potential in the screenplay and decided to help get it made. By a stroke of luck, their friend – and wannabe director – Doug Liman caught a glance of Favreau’s script whilst round at Simpkin’s apartment one night. He started talking to his friend about it and when Simpkin explained they were trying to raise a budget of so many hundred-thousand dollars to make it, Liman sat up and explained he could walk out onto the streets of LA and shoot the picture for next to nothing with just a open-minded enough cast and a guerrilla-filmmaking sensibility.
The film’s standout scene in terms of guerrilla filmmaking though, has got to be the Las Vegas set sequences. In one early casino sequence a police officer can actually just be caught for a second standing in the background, watching the filming. This is because he had approached the cast and crew moments earlier and asked to see their permit. When it was explained they did not have one, he told them they would have to leave but – after they’d begged – he allowed them to finish the sequence first. A sequence, according to Liman and Favreau, he nearly ruined twice over by continually stepping into the shot and smiling at the camera.
Where the film really works and subsequently comes alive though is in centring the ‘meat’ around the character of Mike and his search for love. The film would never have worked if we’d been left in the hands of Trent (whose ‘comeuppance’ in the film’s final moments is absolutely priceless. A true joy!) But in the hands of a character as likeable as Mike, Swingers becomes invested with so much heart and emotion. He is such a genuinely pleasant, loveable character. One of cinema’s best! When we see him stagger, under-confidently, across the floors of those bars to go and chat to various women, we are as nervous for him as he is for himself. When he is rejected, it stings us just as much as it must sting him. Therefore, the film’s funniest scene is also it’s most outright painful to watch as Mike – thanks to a faulty answering machine – goes from sounding like a lovely natured guy to a stalker to a weirdo in the space of less than five minutes!
Vince Vaughn also delivers a brilliant performance as the egotistical Trent. It’s a career-making turn if ever there was one as Vaughn positively burns up the screen when he is on camera. In fact, Vaughn’s career was boosted into the stratosphere thanks to Swingers as a sample of a scene had to be sent to Steven Spielberg for approval of the use of the Jaws theme in the movie. Spielberg saw Vaughn doing one of his ‘money’ monologues and cast him in the sequel to Jurassic Park straight away, without an audition.
Swingers plays with the conventions of the sort of movie it is ‘meant’ to be. As one of the guys says, “Everybody steals from everybody” (this observation is closely followed by a one-take stedicam shot cheerfully stolen from Scorsese’s Goodfellas and a ‘cast on the move’ shot lifted from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs) but where Swingers comes into it’s own is that it shows us what standard movie plot points – the search for love, the recovery from heartbreak – are like when they have been put through the filter of real life. The final moments of the third act, involving Favreau’s Mike and Heather Graham’s Lorraine, warm us so much because they feel so real. We know that unlike normal Hollywood “meet cute” stories, this could actually happen to anyone of us out there, exactly how we are seeing it happen on the screen (obviously that is dependant on whether we all go out and take ‘swing dancing’ lessons of course!).
We might all wish we were the leads in the likes of Platoon or Goodfellas etc. but in reality we are, more often than not, no more than the Mike’s or the Trent’s of this world. After watching and falling in love with this film, you’ll come to see that that isn’t a bad thing really… well, as long as you’re not a ‘Trent’.
Related Posts:
- THE INDISPENSIBLES - #9: MARTY
- THE INDISPENSIBLES - #0: THE SET-UP
- THE INDISPENSIBLES - #4: GOODFELLAS
- THE INDISPENSIBLES - #1: MIDNIGHT RUN
- THE INDISPENSIBLES - #3: ROCKY
4 Responses to “THE INDISPENSIBLES - #17: SWINGERS”
I just realised that so far none of your Indispensibles have been in my top 25 movies list, actually only one appears in my Top 100, and that’s This is Spinal Tap at no. 26. How I overlooked Swingers I’m not sure so I may have to revisit it. I must’ve lent it to someone the day Iw as going through my DVD collection to make up the list.
I love Swinger, one of those movies I relate to too much and it either makes me happy of crushingly depressed!
If this series of essays serves as nothing more than to get anyone and everyone to visit or revisit each of these flicks then I will be delighted with just even that!
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