Tiny Furniture

source: Tiny Furniture

Young woman comes home after graduating from college and tries to get her life together as she deals with her mom, her sister, some friends and two potential boyfriends. Inde darling film is both much better than I expected but not as good as I hoped. Don't get me wrong its a good movie and worth a look, I just was bothered by a few things. First up some of the performances are uneven. Lena Dunham who wrote, directed and stars in the film is good, but erratic in her performance, I think largely because she's doing too much. The guy who plays the slacker who latches on to her an leaches from her for a couple of weeks is so dead pan as to be nearly dead. The character is also so unlikable you don't see what out heroine sees in him (his philosophical cowboy is not even clever). The other people are mostly good, with Dunham's mom hitting one out of the park in every scene she's in. Another problem I have is that while the camera work looks great its rather static and unremarkable. I understand Dunham was working under constraints but it makes the film feel like any number of inde films, which it really isn't. On the other hand the script is often witty and on target (why the film isn't like many independent films recently). I really liked much of the dialog even if the drama is uneven. Worth a look

Overall I enjoyed this movie, despite the fact the story ends abruptly without a conclusion of any kind. The writer/director creates authenticity by playing the main character as a version of herself; her mom and sister play the main character's mom and sister, and it's filmed in their apartment. It's more than a self-indulgent exercise; minor characters are interesting (notably "Charlotte") and it's well written. In addition, the writer/director/lead actress shows guts by wearing no makeup in many scenes and showing herself getting dressed and showering despite being quite out of shape. There is no self-consciousness of any kind in these scenes. It is a kind of feminism. But the real reason I found this film fascinating is how it shows what's changed between my generation (late Baby Boomer) and Generation Y: "Aura," the main character, comes home from college to live with her mom and unlike the youth of my generation, has no problem with living at home. She crawls into bed with her mother when she's feeling down. This isn't an issue because her mom is single; in fact, there's no mention of a father of any kind in the entire film. No one from my generation wanted to live with their parents after college and we did not sleep in our parents' beds past the age of 8, partly because there were usually two of them, including one of the opposite sex. Aura senses that underneath her successful exterior, her mother is lonely. It's unclear who is more needy, Aura or her mother. I came away from this film convinced that the sea change of the past 25 years has been the epidemic of divorce. "Aura" pursues two men, unaware that neither of them are interested in her and both are loathsome--one has grandiose ideas about a non-existent career while mooching off of friends; another is an underachieving liar and cheat. Perhaps it's Aura's low self-esteem, or maybe her unfamiliarity with men from not having had a father or brother, that makes her unable to see these men as they really are. Perhaps she also can't see that being overweight and having low self-esteem might be barriers to finding the right man. In one scene, Aura's younger sister has a party and Aura freaks out, afraid she'll be blamed for allowing minors to drink in their apartment. In my generation the 22-year-old would never have assumed this responsibility because high school students were not considered children who needed to be baby-sat. High schoolers in the 1970s and 80s didn't refer to themselves as "kids," as Aura's family does; this term was used to describe 8-year-olds; high school students called each other "people." Aura's mother complains Aura's friend Charlotte is "unsupervised" despite being a 22-year-old adult. In short this is a perhaps inadvertently devastating portrait of current teens and young adults: Overly close with their often single moms, seeing themselves as being like children, lacking self-consciousness but also lacking self-esteem. The young men have difficulty with commitment and with respect for women (again, probably because of the divorce epidemic but perhaps also because of widespread *--references to which are made several times in the film) and the young women bond with each other while feeling confused about how to approach the increasingly disinterested and disrespectful men whom they meet. I observe these phenomena or hear about them all the time in my professional practice and seeing a dramatic representation on an intimate scale in this film was quite fascinating.

I really hate this movie. I get that Aura was meant to be portrayed as a whiny snob but it ruined the entire film for me. I harbored high hopes starting this movie but was rewarded with tantrums, pipe sex, and tantrums again. A spoiled, artsy girl with no direction feels as if she's been forced into adulthood and now must juggle finding a job and fighting for her mother's attention. I believe there happens to be only one great thing about this movie which is her mother's apartment. Of the parts I could handle of the film, I was left wondering how the mother ever managed to remember what went in which beautifully white cabinet.