By Sofia Majstorovic

“I’m gonna tell you this and then I’m gonna go,” says Carey (Adelaide Clemens), the reluctantly wistful protagonist of The Swearing Jar, Lindsay MacKay’s banter-laden follow-up to Wet Bum (2014). Carey’s ding-dong-ditch attitude towards her romantic partners manifests throughout MacKay’s sophomore effort via Adam Sandler-esque acoustic sets whose consistency counterbalances the film’s chronological twists as we learn, in song, of her pregnancy with longtime partner Simon (Patrick J. Adams), puppy love with local bookstore spaniel Owen (Douglas Smith), and multiform emotional deteriorations with an insultingly ready-made “Evil [Step]Mother Person.” 

Simon’s “Evil Mother Person” Beverly (Kathleen Turner) exposes herself early on as a blustery termagant whose smoking habits will bear the burden of her character development. (The sitcom-heavy recognizability of many of the film’s actors causes one to wonder if Turner was cast based upon her recurring role on Entourage rather than her halcyon ʼ80s days.) As Simon’s screen time subsides due to extenuating circumstances, Owen’s role as a human service animal for Carey squeamishly comes to the fore. When their relationship crescendos into an invitation from boy to girl for more serious mutual jam-sessions, Carey reveals, flatly,  that she doesn’t “believe in collaboration,” a revelation that serves as a decent metaphor for the newfangled style of femme fatale her character dully represents: the self-diagnosed “awkward” woman in her late thirties whose habitual disgust with sex sources her power; a woman who scoffs at traditional gender roles by burning batches of cookies and donning messy buns, all the while demonstrating very little mobility beyond these puritanical (and purgatorial) domestic environments.

Conventionality aside, there is a thread of blind philistinism in The Swearing Jar that presents itself most bewilderingly when Carey reacts with shock to Simon’s recitation of a line from Shakespeare. This is meant to be taken as evidence of Simon’s “nerdcore” tendencies rather than an utterly normal thing for a man who is described as an author of books to do. His career is just one of many inside jokes between Simon and Carey that are harped on intensely only to evaporate and reappear in The Swearing Jar’s final minutes. This includes the film’s namesake itself, the swearing jar, a literal object that vanishes for the bulk of the movie before materializing during Carey’s last acoustic set as a deux ex machina vacation fund: a convenient closing act of romantic self-indulgence for the inexplicably recalcitrant Carey, and the movie that would make her its love object.

Sofia Majstorovic