THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #87

SWINGERS (1996)

The Writer

Jon Favreau

Why It's Here

There's a moment early in the film version of The Untouchables where Al Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, makes a throwaway statement that contains great profundity. As everyone with him laughs at a joke made by a reporter, Capone says, "Well, you know, like many things in life, we laugh because it's funny and we laugh because it's true." I always think of this line when I consider the next film on my countdown. Swingers, written by Jon Favreau (who also co-produced the film and plays the lead role), is a picture rife with laugh-out-loud moments and memorable comic scenes as it charts the nightlife adventures of a gang of neo-hipsters in contemporary L.A. But there's a lot of films that made me laugh much louder and more often than Swingers that are not on this list, and that's because, as Big Al reminds us, we don't just laugh because it's funny. And Favreau's film is funny largely because it's true, not in an autobiographical sense (though I suspect there's a lot of that here, too), but in its bone-deep understanding of young bachelors looking for Miss Right while swinging hard with Miss Right Now. In fact, this humble low-budget independent flick is arguably the most honest cinematic look at the single male mindset I've ever seen, a film I often tell my female friends they should see if they want to understand how the other half lives…or at least how it thinks and feels about romance.

Mike (Favreau) is a native New Yorker, a recent arrival in the City of Angels. Like many young men, he went west in pursuit of Hollywood glory, and like most who make the cross-country trek, he has found the stars much dimmer up close. He's got a steady gig hosting an open mic night at a comedy club, and he did a day's work playing a bus driver in a movie, which at least got him into the unions. But he's got no agent, no roles on the horizon…and then there's Michelle, Mike's girlfriend of six years who he left behind to pursue fame and fortune. Unwilling to do the long-distance thing, Michelle ended it, and Mike is stuck in an emotional deadlock that nothing seems able to break. Fortunately, though (or maybe not so fortunately), Mike has developed a strong circle of west-coast friends who are doing their best to guide him back into the L.A. dating waters. Charles (Alex Desert) is a smooth cat who swaps audition war stories with Mike and is on a constant prowl for the perfect party ("This place is dead anyway!"). There's Rob (Ron Livingston), a buddy from back east who Mike is showing the L.A. ropes even as he hits Rob up for news about certain women on the homefront. There's a boy named Sue (Patrick Van Horn), whose dad was a big Johnny Cash fan, and who seems to over-compensate for his feminine handle with displays of swinging-dick machismo…not to mention the huge gun he carries around, which may be overcompensation of another sort. And there's Trent (Vince Vaughn), a fast-talking, Sinatra-smooth sharpster who knows all the angles and who will not rest until Mike is happy again…or at least well-laid. After all, as everyone incessantly reminds our hero, "You're so money, and you don't even know it!"

This line, with its use of "money" as the new "awesome", reflects the unique milieu of Swingers, a milieu that helps it to stand out from many of the generic relationship comedies clogging the arthouses of America. Though his film is set in present day, and though Mike and his friends do enjoy some modern-day leisure activities (most notably raucous games of hockey on the Sega Genesis), Favreau's characters mostly exist in a retro-hip living flashback to the days of Rat Pack ring-a-ding-ding. The guys all dress in classic early '60s duds, with garish button-down patterned shirts and baggy high-waisted pants with long chains on their wallets. Trent drives not the rather harshly used piece of junk one would expect of a struggling actor, but a 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente in very cherry condition. Their hangouts are old-fashioned clubs with pictures of Ol' Blue Eyes on the wall and groups like the neo-swing Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on the bandstand (we even spot some zoot suits on the dance floor in one scene). These are guys who knock back martinis and scotch, smoke big ostentatious cigars, play golf, and take trips to Vegas to kick back "old school" at the classic casinos far from the garish lights of the Strip. And, like the Rat Packers of yore, they are constantly on the make for "beautiful babies". Swingers was a film that both tapped into and helped to spawn a brief cultural moment where it was hip for twentysomething kids to quaff highballs, listen to Esquivel records, and generally cat around like Frank and Dino and the boys.

But the film would have been nothing more than a cultural blip, as much of a cinematic footnote as the lambada films of the early '90s, if it weren't for the fact that Favreau's script, for all the rich irony of its mise-en-scene, is just so damned honest about its characters, their world and how they feel. It all starts with the setting itself. People don't often think of it this way, but Swingers is one of the most dead-on accurate movies ever made about life in L.A….or at least about a very specific kind of life in L.A. And I speak from experience when I say this, because I am basically a guy just like Mike. Three years ago, I threw all my worldly possessions in a Penske truck, hooked my car to the back of it, and drove for five days across America, all because I had a thirst to see my name in lights that only Los Angeles could quench (granted, I want it to say "Written By" above my name, not "Starring", but same difference, really). Like Mike, I have found both success and setbacks in the big bad city. Like Mike, it's gotten at times so disheartening that I've thought about packing it in and heading back to where I came from. And like Mike, I ultimately can't bring myself to do it, because I just love this rotten town too much. Favreau clearly loves Los Angeles as much as Mike and I do, and his screenplay is full of affectionate details that nail the wonderful absurdities of life in L.A. There's the nightclubs that attain their hip status by being almost impossible to find, buried in back alleys without signs over the door. There's the way that everyone you meet is in show business, no matter how marginally, and how everyone knows all about the biz and its angles (Mike is dismayed when a waitress he's trying to pick up is incredulous that he has no West Coast booking agent). There's the impressed noises everyone makes when Mike gets a phone number from a woman with the "right" area code (the same as mine, I'm proud to admit). There's the late-night diners, the shitty municipal golf courses, the barely furnished "up-and-comer" apartments, the poker games where all anyone wants to do is talk about their favorite shots from their favorite movies, because the person that everyone in L.A. really wants to be is Pauline Kael. One of my favorite gags in the film is one I didn't even realize was a gag until I got out here, where our quintet head out for a modeling-agency party in the Hollywood hills, and we see all five of them get into a separate car, the better to be able to leave the party with their beautiful baby of choice unencumbered by some hanger-on who needs a ride home. Favreau's dialogue as also filled with paeans to the superiority of Los Angeles life, like Mike's comment to Rob about the preponderance of beautiful women in the town: "It's like the hottest one percent of all people come out here and find their way into our gene pool." (I make a comment similar to this almost every time my buddies and I find ourselves scoping out women at that evening's watering hole of choice.) And when Mike hits his lowest ebb, when he's all ready to give up and go crawling back to the Big Apple, Rob appeals to him not with the enticement of better romantic luck on the horizon, but with the simple facts of life in L.A.: "Look out the window. It's sunny every day here. It's like manifest destiny. Don't tell me we didn't make it. We made it! We are here." Swingers is indeed a love story, and its first and arguably greatest love is the city in which its characters do their thing.

Swingers is also a tale of male platonic love, and I can think of few other films with such a clear understanding of the way young men relate to each other. For the most part, guys tend to bond not by talking and sharing their thoughts, but by doing things together, and the guys of Swingers are big-time doers. Favreau shows his characters golfing together, gambling together, drinking and chasing women together, and even engaging in some old-fashioned roughhousing over a game of video hockey (this might, of course, just be necessarily re-channeled aggression, as the boys lament the removal of on-the-ice fights from the game). There's a lot of cock-of-the-walk posturing, good-natured name calling, and goofy drunken revels to be had. The clique is also, as with most groups of close friends, relatively self-contained, and their near-brush with a gang of hip hop guys almost ends tragically when Sue whips out his gat and shoves it in the guys' faces ("Didn't you see Boyz N The Hood? Now one of us is gonna get shot!"). But Trent is able to smooth the tensions not with emotional appeals, but by buying the hip-hoppers chicken and waffles at Roscoe's (another L.A. shoutout) and inviting them over for a spirited round of hockey.

One might be tempted to think these guys, whose public interactions seem relatively superficial, are not really all that close. But when the chips are down, as they frequently are in Mike's tormented heart, Favreau reveals how deep their affections really are, and how profound his understanding of men's approach to romance, by having Trent and the others put all their energies into getting their pal back on his romantic feet. They cheer him on as he approaches a pretty brunette named Nicki (Brooke Langton) in a bar and attempts to garner the all-important "digits". They give him a bizarre romantic pep talk comparing him to a powerful bear that has to figure out how to "kill the bunny" as he works his game on the women in their orbit (legend has it that Favreau lifted this dialogue almost verbatim from a real conversation he had with Vaughn in an L.A. bar). They tell him he needs to play up his mysterious and unknowable qualities, "like the guy in the rated-R movie…you're not sure how you feel about him". They advise him to just pretend to forget about his ex and not to call her, and eventually he really will forget her…at which point she'll probably get in touch. "That's the problem," Rob admits. "Somehow they always know not to come back until you really forget." They engage in an Abbott-and-Costello-like dialogue about the proper time for Mike to wait before calling Nicki after getting her number, arguing between the merits of waiting two or three days, before Trent and Rob admit they're both planning to wait six days to call their babies. Granted, some of their therapeutic approach is blatantly condescending, as when Mike, miserable over his losses in a casino (the latest loss, as he sees it, in a string of many), is called a "big winner" by Trent, who lifts his arm in the air triumphantly: "Mikey, he's the big winner! Mikey wins!" Favreau's rendering of these exchanges indicates his deep understanding of men vis a vis romance. As with much else in our lives, we view the give-and-take of love and dating not as an emotional transaction, but as a science project, a problem to be solved, and we are never short of theories and concepts, no matter how grandiose, to explain why we behave in the ultimately irrational ways we do when faced with the opposite sex.

Of course, every think tank needs a master scholar, and Trent is Swingers' resident genius of love…or so he would have you believe. He's the guy who has it all figured out, who has an angle for every woman that hoves into his field of vision, and he delights in forcing his worldview on those around him. What becomes clearer the more you think about it, however, is how basically unlikable Trent can often be, and how arrested and juvenile his vision of the modern mating dance is. He is not a believer in playing the sensitive card with women, in "talking about puppy dogs and ice cream", and when Mike tells him he always gets stuck by his desire to treat women with respect, his response is caustic: "Come on, Mikey. Respect, my ass." Trent blatantly admits that he doesn't really listen to women when they talk to him: "I just stare at their mouth, and crinkle my forehead, and somehow I turn out to be a big sweetie." He proves himself more than willing to go to bed with a woman he doesn't even like that much, as he does with a waitress he picks up in Vegas. And he's not afraid to wear his cruelty on his sleeve if a woman really rubs him the wrong way. After finding himself trapped in a conversation with an obnoxious would-be actress at the modeling party, Trent ends up with her digits…which he makes a show of ripping up almost right under her nose. Trent may be a great friend (he defends Mike's sad-sack state after Sue gets in Mike's face about his inability to move on from Michelle), and his advice often has the ring of sincerity (he tells a painfully pining Mike that he knows it's hard, that he's been there himself), but when it comes to the females, we know that he honestly is as clueless as Mike himself, that he's flailing as much as the rest of the guys out there. Favreau knows this too, and he socks home the joke in a funny final moment where Trent, plying his player's trade, is hoisted on his own petard by an unexpected beautiful baby.

But for all its witty dialogue and amusing situations, Favreau never forgets that Mike is feeling genuine pain, and it's this clear-eyed vision of his anguish that makes Swingers the memorable experience it is. With a potent honesty one would guess has to come from personal experience, Favreau's portrayal of Mike's travails brilliantly anatomizes the near-death and rebirth of a romantic idealist. It doesn't matter to Mike that his misery is mostly self-inflicted; after all, he's the one who left to go to L.A., prompting Michelle's decision to leave him. That doesn't make it hurt any less, and the script hits all the beats along the road to recovery, bases I myself have covered in the wake of romantic failure. There's the incessant comparing of women to the idealized ex, as Mike describes virtually every woman who's not Michelle as a "skank". There's the wince-inducing acts of romantic self-sabotage, with Mike meeting a beautiful baby and proceeding to drag her into a long conversation about Michelle. There's the dark days of despair, where he can't even work up the energy to get dressed and shave and just sits in a ball of blankets on his floor, swilling orange juice and wondering why she won't just call him already. In one of the movie's most celebrated scenes, Mike calls Nicki as soon as he gets home from the club where he met her, and proceeds to leave her a half-dozen voicemails, one right after the other, that go from expectant excitement to piteous soul-baring to resignation about their "relationship"'s failure. And there's the moment where the light finally breaks the horizon, which comes, as it often does, in the form of tough love from friends who are alternately bleeding for their buddy and sick of his self-pitying B.S. When confronted point-blank by Mike with the million-dollar question, "Why won't she call?", Rob can't hold back any more. "She won't call because you left. She's got her own life to deal with, man, and that's in New York...alright? And she's a sweet girl, and I love her to pieces, but fuck her, man. You gotta get on with your life." (In many ways, Rob is the anti-Trent of Swingers, with a deep understanding of the opposite sex and no desire to impose that on others against their will.) And Favreau does not forget to include the moment that almost always comes but that we almost always think never will…the moment when we meet someone new who might not be the one, but who at least has the power to flush the mess of the last relationship out of our system for good.

Favreau's understanding of the male mind's relationship to love and romance is so acutely developed that it almost makes you wish his perception of the female character was just as strong. However, if there is one knock on Swingers, it's that it is maybe too much a "guy movie", that the women are not really developed as characters with desires and dreams of their own. The women that Mike, Trent and the boys traffic with throughout the film are mostly attractive ciphers, sounding boards for the fellas' philosophies and targets for their crude-but-sincere romantic overtures. They are not really given their own points of view; they are viewed resolutely from the outside. Even Lorraine (Heather Graham), the woman who starts to snap Mike out of his stupor, is mainly made relatable by her similarities to Mike himself, her recent arrival in Los Angeles, the relationship she left behind. Combined with occasional flashes of homophobic humor (after finding himself attracted to a Vegas waitress who dresses as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Mike asks if that makes him a "fag") and the frequent use of the word "bitch" as an insult, one could even make the case that Swingers is a misogynistic text. But really, where do you draw the line between a film that doesn't understand women and a film that's merely about people who don't understand women? In either case, the film's portrayal of its men never falters; in many ways, Swingers can be seen as the indie precursor to the contemporary, Judd Apatow-spearheaded breed of date movies, pictures like Knocked Up and Superbad that deal with tales of love and relationships from a resolutely male perspective…and which have likewise been accused of turning their women into unknowable, arm's-length love objects.

For all of this, I have to confess that my reasons for having Swingers on this list may be as purely personal as anything else. They always say that if you watch enough movies, you will eventually see your own life story played out on the screen, and that's how I felt as I watched Mike struggle to consolidate his career, find true love, and leave behind the bad past as he swings through his nights with buddies who, while sometimes as lost and rudderless as him, always have their hearts in the right place. I felt this way about Swingers and Mike even before I came to Los Angeles, and now that I am a full-blown Angeleno, the picture plays even more like home movies for me. Favreau may or may not have written what he knows, but he definitely wrote what I know, and the result is a film that never fails to stir many smiles and much laughter. And like many things in life, I laugh because it's genuinely funny, and I laugh because it's so brutally, brilliantly true.

AWARDS WON: Florida Film Critics Circle Award, Newcomer of the Year (shared with Swingers director Doug Liman)