Quantity isn’t quality, or a substitute for quality, but it is a mark of the filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s particular kind of artistic quality. That quality is on view and developed further in the eight episodes of the second season of “Easy”—created, written, directed, and co-produced by Swanberg—which dropped on Netflix in December. Swanberg is the most prolific person in American moviemaking. These near-half-hour episodes add up to nearly four hours of viewing; they were released fourteen months after the first season’s eight episodes. In between, he made the feature film “Win It All,” which was also released on Netflix. (I was remiss in not bending the theatrical-release-centered rules of my best-of-the-year list to include it there, where it belongs.)
Swanberg is prolific in stories, seeing anecdotes lyrically and giving them a sort of harmonic structure that serves as an invigorating basis for improvisation. His intuitive sense of form provides his actors, like singers, with brisk twists and turns that elevate his stories’ emotional clarity and directness into a kind of offhanded complexity. A longtime resident of Chicago, Swanberg builds “Easy” around various communities, neighborhoods, and milieux of that city, featuring a wide range of characters and activities. As in the first season of “Easy,” the eight new episodes are of varying merit, varying intensity, varying force of imagination—and the best of them are reflexive and personal in a distinctive new way.
Swanberg, who started out as a nearly no-budget filmmaker, has achieved an unmistakable level of success, if success is defined in the way that many filmmakers might do so—as the ability to make a living by doing nothing but filmmaking, working on uncompromised projects in which he’s emotionally invested. As a result, he gets to meet more people than he did when he was a private filmmaker without institutional support. Then he worked with his friends; now he meets new people, goes new places, makes new friends, and his series reflects the widening spectrum of his experience, even secondhand. Like Agnès Varda, he’s a gleaner of encounters and observations, and, like Varda, he’s a philosophical chameleon who coaxes a sharp-lined identity and a distinctive world view from his varied round of incidental associations.
Several episodes of Season 2 of “Easy” are variations on the upper-middle-class blues. For instance, in the first episode, “Package Thief,” residents—mainly white residents—of a comfortable suburb find their sense of community challenged when they suspect that someone is stealing Amazon packages left at their doors. It’s an incisive view of the latent violence and the casual racism that hold a seemingly charming community together.
Several characters from the first season recur in the second. In the eighth episode, “Baby Steps,” Kate Micucci appears, again, as a piano-teacher-cum-babysitter whose day job gives rise to a portrait of anguished solitude. In the third episode, “Spent Grain,” two beer-brewing brothers from Season 1 (played by Dave Franco and Evan Jonigkeit) clash over an “experimental” product while their wives (played by Zazie Beetz and Aya Cash) collaborate happily on a project of their own. In each episode, Swanberg’s performers are alive to the moment; they seem to be speaking rather than acting. There’s none of the clatter-clatter-snippy-snip patter that actors rattle off in so many series, the sort of lockstep scripting and patterned expressivity that so often turns television fiction into tasteless fakery.
As a younger filmmaker working with scant means and the people at hand, Swanberg often did his own camera work and lighting, and his compositional sense was sometimes impetuously freehanded, sometimes drastically static. For “Easy,” the cinematographer is Eon Mora, whose work is fluid, alert, and graceful, but rarely original. His signal moments in the second season arise in parsing the teeming roundelay of the third episode, “Side Hustle,” in which an editor (Jane Adams) encourages an essayist (played by the writer Karley Sciortino) to expand her ideas into fiction, and a producer (Chris Doubek) considers a script by a standup comedian (Odinaka Malachi Ezeokoli). The story is about what people do for money, and what what they do for money does for them and their art; its subject is the nature and source of stories. With its sexual explicitness and its discussions of the refraction of experience into fiction, it suggests the very process of distillation and reconfiguration that goes into the making of a series such as “Easy.”
Jerry Lewis said that an honest view of a movie character would have to entail obscenity, and, though “Easy” isn’t obscene, it takes its characters’ diverse sex lives seriously, and does so explicitly. “Side Hustle” crams an extraordinary amount of activity, sexual and otherwise, into its brief span; it’s a feature film in disguise. “Lady Cha Cha” is centered on a young woman, a student (Kiersey Clemons) who seeks to explore her sexuality by performing in a burlesque show, and her girlfriend (Jacqueline Toboni), an art curator, who disapproves. (In “Easy,” class similarities only mask, but don’t efface, cultural differences arising from racial identity.)
Though they are all set in Chicago, the episodes of “Easy” don’t have the connective tissue, the over-all urban fabric, both architectural and psychological, administrative and geographical, that conjures a philosophical rhapsody of city life, as in such feature films as Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” or much of the oeuvre of Spike Lee, or of Varda herself. What’s more, several of the new episodes rely on such corner-cutting shorthands of form as intercut contrasts and comparisons of a conspicuous, sometimes an obvious irony. But the episodes of the second season that are a match for Swanberg’s best feature films include one that crams a feature’s worth of incidents and characters uneasily into its brief span (“Side Hustle”), and two that are built on the most developed abstract framework (“Prodigal Daughter” and “Conjugality”).
Two of these three, not coincidentally, feature Jane Adams, who’s one of the most inspired presences in the modern cinema and may have had her best role to date in Swanberg’s extraordinary feature film “All the Light in the Sky,” from 2011. Her character in “Easy,” Annabelle Jones, returns from the first season and is seen both in “Side Hustle” and in “Conjugality,” in which Marc Maron also returns, as Jacob Malco, a cantankerously temperamental graphic novelist whose subject matter is his personal life. In the Season 1 episode “Art and Life,” Jacob had the tables turned on him by another artist (Emily Ratajkowski). Now, in “Conjugality,” Jacob is working on the twentieth-anniversary edition of his book, also titled “Conjugality,” which is about the end of his marriage to a woman who is long out of his life. His editors, however, want her to do some publicity for the book. Against his better judgment, he gets in touch with her, and their turbulent reunion and the resulting publicity resonates with an irony that links it to “Package Thief,” the first episode of Season 2. As in “Package Thief,” Swanberg, himself no stranger to the uncontrollable distractions of social media, constructs a whiplash story in which an artist’s public image takes on a life of its own, for better or worse—and in which the people in an artist’s life play a decisive, even unexpectedly active, role in the art.
Swanberg’s best features are composed of moments between moments; they allow for both physical and dialectical meandering, moments of gradual accretion and sudden discovery—the kinds of moments that lose their wonder when their development is, in the interest of tempo, forced through editing. Swanberg is an epiphanic filmmaker, which is why the best episode of the second season of “Easy” has a short-film aesthetic of its own—one that’s reminiscent of short stories—and is built around an audaciously sardonic twist on spiritual inspiration that takes such inspiration as its very subject. In that episode, “Prodigal Daughter,” an eighteen-year-old girl, Grace (Danielle Macdonald, who is best known for her starring role in “Patti Cake$”), who lives with her prosperous parents in a comfortable suburb, is caught in bed with a boy, and her punishment is mandatory Sunday-morning church attendance with her parents for the rest of the school year. But Grace, long alienated from her Catholic roots, takes the preachings of Father Timothy (Tim Kazurinsky) and the lessons of Bible study (led by a young woman played by Sophie Traub) literally, with outrageous results that suggest a Catholic counterpart to Philip Roth’s gleefully impious short story “The Conversion of the Jews.”
The story’s aphoristic ingenuity, a kind of thesis of short filmmaking, displays both the self-surpassing energy of Swanberg’s episodic storytelling in the two seasons of “Easy” and its built-in limits; “Prodigal Daughter” is a short film that, in standing apart from the others in the series, stands alongside his features. The others merely stand near them—a worthy position nonetheless. Where Swanberg transformed his working methods and expanded his range of vision with the brisk, notebook-like production of “Easy,” the show’s best episodes and deepest implications seem to point toward a new round of cinematic transformation and the self-transformation that would result.
