The characters in The Sun Never Sets make decisions that are so infuriating that we spend a large chunk of the movie feeling some combination of astonishment and exasperation. What in the world are you thinking?? we wonder, as we watch them swing from emotion to emotion. But life is messy, and romantic relationships may be the messiest part of this messy life, and however contrived the details of this movie are, it nails the untethered chaos of love that has gone sideways and may never get fixed.
The prime culprit is Jack, played by Jake Johnson, but this isn’t really his story. It’s Wendy’s story, and she’s played by Dakota Fanning in one of the actor’s best performances, as a woman in her early 30s who lives in Alaska. Her friends are all moving into the next phases of their lives, and when her best friend announces she’s pregnant, Wendy seems to be at a real crossroads. She’s been dating Jack for a couple years, she loves him, she loves his kids, but he’s quite a bit older than she is, divorced, and says he doesn’t want to remarry or have more kids. Wendy says this is all fine with her, but apparently Jack doesn’t believe it, and he comes up with the shockingly poorly conceived idea that he and Wendy should sort of break up, just for the summer, so Wendy can really think about what she wants. If she comes back, great, if not, no hard feelings. We want to slap Jack in the face as he says these words, partly because of the clear hubris driving him to do this, and even more because he’s telling Wendy point blank that she doesn’t feel the way she says she feels.
But what Jack didn’t count on is that an old flame of Wendy’s is back in town, and the whole situation quickly flies out of Jack’s control, while Wendy faces an extraordinary amount of confusion about what she should be doing, how she feels, and how anyone else feels, too. We yell at the screen as each of them behaves in ways that seem wholly counterproductive, but take a step back, and how can we truly blame them? How can we expect any part of love to make sense anyway? The movie’s director, Joe Swanberg, made his name in the mumblecore movement of the first part of this century, and we have to figure his time observing the small, everyday lives of people has given him the ability to do what he does here. Which is to say, he creates the kind of turmoil in us that his characters are experiencing on screen. Whatever knots the movie twists itself into in order to get us there, what we’re left with is a real, uncommon emotional truth.
The Sun Never Sets is in theaters.