Dakota Fanning anchors an unsteady romantic triangle in Alaskan relationship drama
The Sun Never Sets
Starring Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson & Cory Michael Smith
Directed by Joe Swanberg
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Sept. 4
“The heart wants what it wants,” wrote poet Emily Dickinson back in 1862, and it’s been echoed across time by pundits and popular culture. But what if the heart doesn’t quite know what it wants?
Dakota Fanning, who successfully progressed from little-girl childhood roles into more matured movie fare, faces a very grown-up dilemma in this indie drama about a messy romantic triangle. She plays Wendy, a young woman whose two-year relationship with Jack (Jake Johnson) has hit a rough patch; he wants them to take a break from each other. Wendy reluctantly agrees, and then unexpectedly runs into a former boyfriend, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), rekindling an old flame.
Suddenly, she’s adrift in some choppy romantic waters, unmoored and unsure, bobbing between two guys who are increasingly jealous of each other. Maybe she just needs to shove off, in the boat we see that she wants to buy in the opening scene, and drop anchor elsewhere.
Director/writer/producer Joe Swanberg is a Hollywood indie filmmaker who helped establish the subgenre of “mumblecore” back in the early 2000s. Mumblecore movies were low-budget, dialogue-heavy relationship flicks, where characters talked a lot but didn’t “do” much.
That certainly fits here. There’s a lot of talk—about what Wendy, Jack and Chuck say they want, what they don’t want and what they want to do. But there’s minimal “action” to push the story along. Unless you count seeing Dakota Fanning in a hard hat, driving an excavator for Wendy’s job as a construction worker. Maybe that “hole” she’s digging represents the hole in her life, the absence of a stable foundation, a crater that just seems to keep getting bigger and deeper.
The title alludes to the story’s setting of Anchorage, Alaska, where the summer daylight, just south of the Arctic Circle, is prolonged and plentiful and night is just a slightly dimmer and much shorter version of day. It mirrors the movie’s three main characters, living in the dim twilight of relationships that are endless repeating cycles, neither day nor night but something, and somewhere, in-between.
Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith
This isn’t a big blockbuster. It’s a quieter, more intimate film. There are no speeding cars, no fisticuffs, no superheroes or monsters, no explosions. It feels like we’re watching real people, with real lives, jobs, needs and routines. Jack is an elementary-school basketball coach, Chuck an airplane pilot who takes tourists on Alaskan sightseeing trips. It helps that Fanning’s costars aren’t superstar leading men. You may have seen Jake Johnson as Nick Miller, the bartender in TV’s New Girl, but that was nearly a decade ago; Cory Michael Smith played Chevy Chase in 2024’s dramatization of the opening night of Saturday Night Live, and the Riddler on the Fox series Gotham. Casting Leo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet, for instance, would have made Jack and Chuck much less “believable”—and would have cost a whole lot more.
But Fanning is the true crux of the story, giving a standout performance as a woman feeling the tick-tick-tick of her biological clock—especially when she’s hanging with her married friend Lindsay (former Disney star Debby Ryan), who’s positively glowing in the early stages of her pregnancy. As Wendy goes back and forth between her two romantic partners, harboring real feelings for them both, she faces a tough choice. Will she go with the divorced Jack, already a “family man” with two adorable young kids, who says he doesn’t want any more children? Or with the flirty, scruffily sexy “fly boy” Chuck, who, we find out, already burned Wendy once? Or maybe with someone else entirely?
“It’s complicated,” Wendy says at one point.
Yes, it is. Just as life—and matters of the heart—can often be. Because the heart wants what it wants.
And sometimes it just wants to sail away from it all, on a boat.
—Neil Pond