There’s a whole subgenre of disillusionment films we can call Small Town Disease.
Everybody on screen is sick of their podunk ‘burg, is saddled with a dead-end job or pregnant girlfriend and would get the heck out if only somebody would give them a quarter to call a cab.
Throw the movie back to a specific time period, and you splinter off another subgenre, Small Town With Soundtrack. “Diggers” fits the description, tossing universal restlessness into the limited confines of 1976 Long Island. We get a lot of ZZ Top-style guitar work, a lot of bad hair and enough self- conscious cigarette smoking to choke the Marlboro Man.
Much as I resisted it because of its period self-regard, though, I was rooting for the “Diggers” clan by the time this modest film ended. A talented cast of likable actors can do that for a thin script, and Paul Rudd, Ken Marino, Maura Tierney and Ron Eldard eventually won me over.
“Diggers” follows a band of high-school friends now waking up in their early 30s and wondering how to become adults. Rudd is the son of a clamdigger in a locale about to be consumed by the real- estate juggernaut known as the Hamptons. He and his friends would rather carry on their life of desultory digging and nightly beer drinking, but a big seafood corporation is buying up all the rights to the clam beds. Life is passing them by.
Rudd puts on a fisherman’s knit cap and smiles, but it’s a good look for him, and his goodwill gets him through much of his work. Ken Marino gets the juicy part as a profane slob who yells at his growing brood of bratty kids but can’t stop fathering more babies with his sweet wife. Marino has the best scenes and the best lines and makes the most of them.
Director Katherine Dieckmann attracts interesting actors to her projects – for an earlier indie effort, “A Good Baby,” she landed David Strathairn and Henry Thomas. Maura Tierney, most familiar from television’s “ER,” uses her long-suffering qualities to bring poignance to a kid sister’s role in “Diggers.”
About that smoking: There’s way too much of it. Not because I’m a puritan about all that but because it’s a major distraction. When actors and directors get restless with a script that fails to give them enough to do, they often end up drinking and smoking to excess. Pretty soon, all you notice is the way Paul Rudd exhales, or the way Marino stubs out a butt. Vices can set a mood for a period drama like this, but they can also become a crutch for a story lacking true high points.
Reach Michael Booth at mbooth@denverpost.com; keep up on film at denverpost.com/movies
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“Diggers”
R for language, sexual situations, drug use|1 hour, 30 minutes|PERIOD COMEDY-DRAMA|Directed by Katherine Dieckmann; written by Ken Marino; starring Paul Rudd, Maura Tierney, Lauren Ambrose, Ron Eldard and Josh Hamilton|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli.
