Buddymoon is equal parts silly and stale. Alex Simmons’ debut narrative feature tracks best friends David (David Czarra Giuntoli) and Flula (Flula Borg) as they hike the Oregon mountains in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark. The trip was originally planned as David’s honeymoon. Now that his fiancée has called off the wedding, Flula insists that braving the great outdoors as “honey buddies” will cheer David up.
Giuntoli, Borg and Simmons co-wrote a detailed outline of Buddymoon’s script, filling in the blanks over only ten days of filming. The project accommodated the friends’ busy and conflicting schedules.
Borg’s work as a YouTube star and DJ, and Simmons’ experience directing music videos for artists like Sigur Rós, The Decemberists and Borg himself make obvious contributions to Buddymoon. Flula is often shot recording natural sounds for “the greatest song I’ve ever written,” and scenes where the honey buddies drink champagne and get high on shrooms are styled as EDM videos.
Such choices serve an overall hipster-bro aesthetic that is admittedly sweet, but also embarrassing. Giuntoli and Borg’s characters are caricatured versions of the actors themselves, with Giuntoli playing the straight man to Borg’s outrageously silly, hyper-German cartoon.
The problems begin where Buddymoon identifies certain expectations of the feature film format. The plot is framed by a narrative voiceover: David reads analogous excerpts from the diary of William Clark. The trick earnestly appeals to the zeitgeist—a sensitive millennial last grasp at traditional Western masculinity, in this case half-heartedly tempered by the self-conscious acknowledgement that Lewis and Clark traveled with an enslaved guide, York.
More tired is the story’s emotional impetus; that is, The Girl. David’s ex-fiancée, Frankie (Jeanne Syquia), is filmed in flashbacks, her big brown eyes and naked face shot in hilariously clichéd dancing close-ups and dappled light. Such devices assume a narrative need for weighty themes and through-lines—all of which come off forced and superficial in a film whose style and humor are better suited to a series of Internet shorts.
Buddymoon’s saving grace is, on the one hand, the beauty of the Oregon landscape, highlighted to little end but great aesthetic pleasure in luxuriant tracking shots. But it is Borg’s undeniable personality that ultimately carries the film. The caricatured Flula is not only consistently funny, but endearing as a holy fool. Thus, while David sheds a truly boring tear for his run-of-the-mill, hetero-white-guy romance lost, Flula recites portions of his giggle-inducing, would-be wedding toast: “David, we have been friends from when we were both at the bottoms of life, and this is when friendships are made strong, like two chandeliers that have fallen inside a volcano. The chandeliers melt, but then they stick together. And then, when they cool down, they are hugging forever. Nothing can break this new, double-chandelier apart.”
Buddymoon works best where it eschews attempts at depth and fully embraces such sincere silliness. Unfortunately, the film is in large part a hipster collector’s item, like buying a turntable from Urban Outfitters.
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