Digging for Fire is about a married couple with a child who are house sitting for the wife’s affluent yoga student. They spend one weekend away from each other so he can do their taxes, and she can get a break from being mom and wife. They have lost themselves as individuals and a couple after having a child whom they love and put all their energy into. Emblematic of the deterioration of their relationship is his interest in discovering a human bone and a rusted gun on the property and her desire to be responsible home sitters and leave it alone.
I love independent films, and I’m a fan of Jake Johnson. I love his manner in The New Girl, Safety Not Guaranteed and even the less than fabulous Let’s Be Cops. Despite these factors and an excellent cast, I could have skipped Digging for Fire. Digging for Fire would be great if it wasn’t released after the HBO series Togetherness, but it was so it isn’t.
Digging for Fire shares similar themes as Togetherness. They are emotionally realistic and resonate with eternal truths about individuality, marriage, and expectations versus reality. These realistic themes are undercut when set in precious/absurd circumstances that jar with the realistic emotions. Because Digging for Fire is shorter, it can’t compete with Togetherness for hitting a nerve, and the ending is way more optimistic and perhaps unrealistic in comparison to its television counterpart. It doesn’t help that Digging for Fire has vaguely Altmanesque ambitions by connecting the couple’s separate adventures through notable tertiary characters. The casting is quite ambitious and talented, but ultimately the material is comparatively thin.
I did like the editing and sound work on Digging for Fire. I liked how the audio bled into scenes that it didn’t belong to. It was symbolic of the couple’s connection even when they were separate.
Unless you’re a huge fan of anyone in the cast and must see everything that person is in, skip Digging for Fire and watch Togetherness, but not if you’re depressed.