Eight Tales of Art and Sex in Joe Swanberg’s “Easy”

Watching a movie in the theatre isn’t the same as watching at home. Who sits on the couch for two straight hours without getting up to go to the kitchen or the bathroom, to make or answer a call, to send an e-mail or a text, or just stretching the legs and clearing the mind? For that matter, when a movie is great, who doesn’t stop it to savor the experience and make it last longer? That’s why movies made for at-home consumption—such as television shows and streaming videos—tend to be shorter than features. It is also why the new world of serial television makes filmmakers (those who are, in fact, filmmakers, directing their every episode) simultaneously into maximalists, who are responsible for four or five or more hours of drama per season, and also miniaturists, whose individual episodes can be considered short films.

Joe Swanberg—the director, at the age of thirty-five, of seventeen features—has made a Netflix series, “Easy,” whose eight episodes (or, I hope, the first eight of many) dropped yesterday, but it’s not quite serial television. He escapes from the genre's conundrums by escaping from its seriality. The show is eight essentially free-standing short films, all between twenty-six minutes and a half-hour in length, and several of which are connected tangentially (as with a lead character in one having a supporting part in another). Only two of them, the third and the eighth episodes, are joined in a single narrative sequence. The eight segments seem to grow together not from the pursuit of a single story but from the impulsive addition of a new facet, a new connection, a new idea, or simply a new story. Rather than serial television, it is more like latticework television, built not from a flowchart but from a round of narrative Twister in which the gameboard keeps adding panels.

The link between the eight films is, above all, tonal and thematic. They’re all set in Chicago (where Swanberg lives); they’re all scenes from the middle class, involving a diverse array of people, some in business, some in the arts, family people with corporate jobs who are nearing the border of middle age, or rising young artists and artisans with or without day jobs. Some are prosperous, some are just getting by, none are desperate—they’ve all achieved a baseline of sustenance. But they all think about money, and the financial impact of the decisions that they make are out front in the dramas.

Swanberg has always made the stories and the dilemmas of his life into the substance of his art. In recent years, his approach has become stark and elemental—in the flux of daily life, he finds the nodal points of big questions and crucial choices, the moments where, almost unnoticed, destinies play out and identities and self-images are at stake. These stories, spare and efficient structures, seemingly pour from him like melodies from a classic songwriter, and, as with the classic songwriters, for Swanberg and his characters the fundamental things apply—love, money, sex, and art; friends, family, children, and freedom.

The first episode, titled “The Fucking Study,” starts the show off with a frank declaration of its themes and a daringly simple compression of their conflicts, as seen in the sexual dissatisfactions of a married couple, Kyle (Michael Chernus), an actor and playwright who is also a stay-at-home dad, and Andi (Elizabeth Reaser), a businesswoman who gave up her own theatre career to support the family. The pivot of the episode is a report that the sex lives of traditional couples tend to be better than those in which lines are blurred or traditional roles are reversed. Both Andi and Kyle wonder why the spark has gone out of their relationship; Andi alludes to the inevitable effect of age on Kyle’s potency, though Kyle fears that his own lack of worldly success diminishes him in her eyes. With Halloween approaching, Andi’s search for costumes for the couple’s two young children leads her to fantasize about sexy costumes and role-playing to spice up her life with Kyle. Meanwhile, their sex life also pivots on the availability of babysitters and friends to watch the children—as well as on money to pay babysitters and the price of the costumes, as well as on the ubiquity of pornography and sex toys in modern intimacy.

Swanberg is credited with writing and directing each episode, but the action and the dialogue have the swing of improvisations, a liveliness and spontaneity that points to an unusual degree of freedom given to the actors. (There’s a moment of painfully exquisite comedy when the couple is in costume and, as Andi begins to role-play, Kyle stops her: “I’m a professional theatre actor, this has to feel real.”) While these short films may involve more writing than Swanberg’s earlier features, the effect is still jazz-like, with the chord changes made a little more intricate, a little more explicit—and the casts, including some well-known performers, negotiate those changes with commitment and inventiveness. Throughout the series, spontaneously arising symbols—icons and images, metaphorically resonant gestures and events—seemingly stop the action in virtual freeze-frames of contemplative and speculative power, as in the sixth episode, similarly centered on a married couple (Malin Akerman and Orlando Bloom) looking to spice up their sex lives. (The totems here include cell phones and a baby monitor.)

The second episode, in which two young women—Jo (Jacqueline Toboni), who is a lesbian, and Chase (Kiersey Clemons), who hasn’t been with a woman—meet at a concert and instantly begin a relationship, is energized by the urgency of desire. The framework of the action is Chase’s effort to remake herself into someone more like Jo: a vegan, a cyclist, and an experimental-film acolyte. Chase’s dialogue has a freewheeling aphoristic brilliance, ranging from her retort when Jo urges her to watch animal-slaughter videos (“I don’t have to see ‘The Passion of the Christ’ to know what happened to the Christ”) to her Brando-esque imprecation while trying out a conspicuously used bike.

With the short films in “Easy,” time itself becomes a character; the episodes’ brevity lends them a sense of urgency—of time passing, of decisions to be made and, once made, of the dominoes of life tumbling ahead, past the horizon, leaving the characters rushing to catch up with the suddenly accelerating pace of their own lives. With art and love in the balance, time speeds up, in the seventh episode, for Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a thirty-two-year-old actress who’s in a play (with Kyle) and is up for a TV role that would require her to relocate to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, she’s breaking up via Skype with her boyfriend, Drew (Jake Johnson), who has gone out of town to deal with family matters, and she talks it over with the third member of the cast, Annabelle—played by one of the most luminous presences in the modern cinema, Jane Adams. Annabelle is in her fifties, her career has seen its best days, and she’s trying to reconnect with an old friend-cum-lover. The floating parallels between the two women’s professional and romantic crises are realized with a sure but light touch that rises to a sublime contemplative indeterminacy.

The linked third and eighth episodes involve the pressure of turning time into money. They’re about two brothers, or, rather, the brother and the bro (or the brothers and the brew): Matt (Evan Jonigkeit), has a corporate-cubicle job that he hates but that pays well; he’s married to Sherri (Aya Cash), who’s pregnant, and the two of them are happily planning their family’s future. Matt’s somewhat estranged bro-brother Jeff (Dave Franco), who spangles his loudly drawled talk with “dude” and manages a hip coffee bar, gets the urge to start an illegal brewery in his garage, and, as part of their reconciliation, Matt (who used to brew for fun when he was younger and had fewer responsibilities) gets drawn into the free-spirited venture by devoting his formidable business skills and some of his money to the project. He chooses not to tell Sherri.

The dramas of secrets and lies—of siblings and spouses, of freedom and responsibility, of opportunity and ambition, of youth veering into age and pleasures slipping into memories—deepens in the sequel, when a journalist named Jason (Hannibal Buress) gets wind of the secret brewery. For Matt, the story would be a springboard to the brewery’s planned growth into a legitimate and possibly very lucrative business; for Jeff, the growth of the business would mean turning a cool thing done for pleasure into an impersonal corporate enterprise.

Working for love while working for money—and the conflicting love of a person and of the art—have long been at the very core of Swanberg’s art (as is his own amateur brewing, which also gave rise to his feature “Drinking Buddies”). The business of art has been the key story of his work ever since there was any business at stake, with his third feature, “Hannah Takes the Stairs.” He, too, has been in a hurry, aware of the pressure of time and the connection between money and art, between creating opportunities and creation itself, and his cinematic role as a small-businessperson (which he talked about in detail this March at South by Southwest) is both a key motive and a key subject.

The episodes have a firm sense of place and geographical specificity; Chicago is also a virtual character throughout the series. Real places (such as the brew pub Half Acre and the café Dark Matter) figure in it, as do the real-life local artist Don’t Fret and the real-life Chicago icon Arthur Agee (one of the main subjects of the documentary “Hoop Dreams”). Swanberg has for the most part been his own best cinematographer, but with Eon Mora, who shot the eight films of “Easy,” the director has found a collaborator who matches his confrontational simplicity, unfussy clarity, and quietly inquisitive pictorial rapture. Their collaboration reaches full flight in the fourth and fifth episodes, which are two of the best short films I’ve seen in a while.

The fourth episode, a melodramatic abstraction with a powerful romantic undertow, is about an Argentinian couple in Chicago, Gabi (Aislinn Derbez) and Bernardo (Raúl Castillo), who are making a decent living and trying hard to have a baby, when their settled and contented life together is roiled by the sudden arrival of a houseguest, a friend from Buenos Aires named Martín (Mauricio Ochmann). The episode begins with the purchase of a new, gray foldout couch, and that couch—on which Martín plops his filthy boots and tosses a dirty towel—becomes a sign of their tensions. Swanberg and the actors, aided by Mora’s images and a lavish score by Dan Romer, infuse the nocturnal, glossy elegance with an undercurrent of frustration and gloom; the passionate currents of its brittle comedy offer echoes of Jean-Luc Godard’s “A Woman Is a Woman.”

The fifth episode—an apogee of Swanberg’s career—is also a high-concept abstraction, but one that turns the camera around on the very essence of Swanberg’s art. Its ingenuity is signalled even by the casting alone: it stars Marc Maron as Jacob Malco, a jovial yet sardonic graphic novelist whose work is relentlessly, ruthlessly autobiographical and whose career is on a downswing. At a painfully underattended reading of his new novel, “Conjugality,” he meets a young artist named Alison Lizowska (Emily Ratajkowski), a similarly brazen autobiographical artist who works, rather, with video. The faceoff between two reflexive artists—adorned with Jacob’s floridly epigrammatic dialogue and Alison’s bitingly insightful retorts—conjures a wonder box of mirrors in mirrors that raises the story’s delicious details (too good to spoil) to heights of speculative giddiness. The reflexive artists’ vertiginous worlds-within-worlds expand to the ironic reverberations of lives lived online; funny, ambitious, and frenetic, yet delicate and precise, it affirms the risky and reckless power of Internet identities and their connection to art. This short film about breaking the barriers between public and private activities, between onscreen events and offscreen lives, suggests precisely the breath-holding wonder that performers and participants must have experienced at the moment of creation: its self-provoking ecstasies must have been as thrilling on location as they are at home, with their sense not merely of creation but of capturing creation on the wing.