Diggers
Directed by Katherine Dieckmann
So many political prejudices infect recent indie films that it’s unusual to see one that avoids them. This refusal is key to the pleasures found in Diggers, the small-scale social comedy directed with almost unerring tact by Katherine Dieckmann. Set in a Long Island clam digger community in the mid-1970s, Diggers dramatizes the universal transitions that occur as young adults grow older and as the larger political world changes around them.
Hunt (Paul Rudd) is saddled with his father’s clam business. His three friends—family man Frankie (Ken Marino), playboy Jack (Ron Eldard) and pot-dealer Cons (Josh Hamilton)—hover between responsibility and stifled freedom. Several women complicate things for these men: Hunt’s divorced sister Gina (Maura Tierney), Jack’s perpetually pregnant wife Julie (Sarah Paulson) and a visiting Manhattanite, Zoey (Lauren Ambrose), who intrigues Hunt’s sense of the possibilities beyond home.
This is the kind of story You Can Count on Me oversentimentalized and that Good Will Hunting ruined. Indie filmmakers tend to falsify the very tone of average life, but Diggers gets the nostalgic details right, such as the background TV footage of the Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter presidential election that carries no discernable hidden judgment but simply an awareness of change.
Diggers has the working-class insight (of lives happening in the margin of big-P politics) that also marked the Farrelly Brothers’ Outside Providence. This concentration on the richness to be observed in non-sophisticated lives is a blessed relief. Ken Marino’s screenplay appreciates the significance of everyday crises, a perception—and respect—also apparent in his robust performance as Frankie.
The modesty of Diggers belies the fact of its uncommon achievement. Everything happens in a low register, but the character presentation is really fine—not glum “realism,” but friendly and appealing credibility. Paul Rudd, often the victim of shallow, bad-choice comedies, displays an extraordinary gentleness, and his co-stars inhabit ’70s guyness—the sideburns, mustaches, beards and physical ease that anticipated today’s neo-slacker—with convincing natural charm. They rediscover their purpose as actors.
Maybe it took a female director to prize this gruff elegance out of them; the only flaw in Dieckmann’s craft is that a town slut character receives no empathy. This is worth noting, not just for the rarity of a woman working on what feels like male material but because Dieckmann’s unflashy, coming-of-individualism story is so nicely persuasive. Not trying to prove boyhood with the macho bravado of Scorsese imitators, Dieckmann captures exactly what makes men human.
