“Hi, this is Nikki. Leave a message...”
There’s a wonderful, painful, truthful scene in Swingers where lovelorn jobbing actor Mike (Jon Favreau) gets home and immediately calls a vivacious girl he’s just met in a bar.
“Hi, this is Nikki. Leave a message...”
Earlier, he’s been advised by savvier buddies to hold off for the “industry standard” two days.
“Hi, this is Nikki. Leave a message...”
But he calls, anyway – at around two in the morning – and her answerphone keeps cutting him off mid-ramble, so he keeps re-calling and re-recording... and then she picks up.
“Mike? Never call me again, okay?”
Thrashing around at the bottom of the LA food-chain, Mike and co are the kind of guys who get turned down for gigs wearing Goofy suits (“They went with someone with more theme-park experience”). They take comfort by keeping up defiant appearances, ditching the conventional clubbing scene for the secondhand nostalgia of ‘neo-lounge’ bars with their Ratpack swagger and old-school swing music.
Mike’s painful journey from post-rejection wallowing to social rebirth is guided by the maddening, magnetic Trent (Vince Vaughn) and his happy-snappy vernacular (“You are so money and you don’t even know it!”). Their louche but likeable crew glide from dive to dive like predatory peacocks, acting up a systematic, seek-and-destroy pantomime of seduction. Mike bores, semi-scores and tries – too hard – to do the right thing. Until, as ever, just when he least expects it, he’s zapped by a gleaming moment of clarity in the form of an endearingly ditzy Heather Graham.
Swingers feels like the best night out you never had. Shot in 22 days for a paltry $250,000, the film’s swashbuckling improv – director Doug Liman simply blagged a cheap camera and soaked up everything, guerilla style – lends it an intimate, visceral vibe.
Dated movie homages and the odd structural niggle aside, Swingers is flash, funny and pretty much perfect. As martial-arts movies transmit their infectious glow of cartoonish toughness, Swingers just makes you want to hit the town. Although we advise male readers to exercise caution before referring to your manor’s womenfolk as “beautiful babies”.
DVD Extras:
Featurette Making It In Hollywood is an ace four-parter covering writing, filming, influence and the lounge subculture. All the main players lay on plenty of passion and insight, although Liman's memories are bittersweet ("I cried when I saw the first dailies. It just didn't seem very exciting").The two yak-tracks are nutritious and contrasting enough to justify listening to both in full. Liman and editor Stephen Mirrione keep it calm and considered, reminiscing about hand-to-mouth rule-breaking and gung-ho filming raids on the Vegas strip. Real-life buddies Favreau and Vaughn are more blokey and excitable. There's terrific chat from Favreau on how he based the script on his own move from New York to LA, while Vaughn's comedy-creepy libidinous panting over the trailer-park sex scene is Commentary Gold: ""OoOOoOh yeah, baby! Big dog gotta eat...""
