If you're a film critic, or someone who creams their pants while reading film criticism, then you wait for it eagerly, every day, often consciously, occasionally years it a time. You fork over hefty chunks of change to piercing-prone, plaid-clad ticket-takers and sandwich yourself between the padded walls of the local arthouse theaters, waiting for this rare species of movie to rear its head. And you know when it does. You know from the minute it starts. I am talking about the proverbial cinematic dark horse, that fledgling indie that you feel obliged, nay, called upon to expose to a larger audience. Guess what, kids? I gots one.
The masterpiece in question is Tiny Furniture, a riotous, gloriously gutsy home movie that sticks a couple of untrained actors in the wildest of concrete jungles and lets them tear it apart with their raw talent. It's an absolute grand slam of a debut for writer/director Lena Dunham, whose exceptional way with words allows her to work wonders on a shoestring. But this film is so conceptually solid, so ruthlessly incisive, so fiercely compassionate, and so flat-out entertaining that I wouldn't deem it hyperbole to call it a triumph for the entire indie business. It's not a game-changer in any way, shape, or form, but it is a thrillingly accurate examination of the intricacies of human behavior, and as such, comes off as both of its time and timeless.
This one's about Aura (Lena Dunham), freshly graduated from Oberlin and slinking back home with only a film degree and a string of much-mocked YouTube videos to her name. At once intimidated and infuriated by her two remaining family members-chronically aloof earth-mother Siri (Laurie Simmons), and sister Nadine (Grace Dunham), a world-class poet who hates poetry-she seeks solace, or at least easy diversion, in a trio of fellow early-middle-aged rolling stones.
There's Jed (Alex Karpovsky), one of Aura's YouTube peers who's struck gold with a whacked-out performance art series called "Nietzschian Cowboy". There's Keith (David Call), an erudite local chef whose obsessions are Vicodin, casual sex, and Cormac McCarthy, in that order. And finally, her old friend Charlotte, a trampy European import who serves as both a frequently-bare shoulder to cry on and the dispenser of claws-out bons mots bitchy enough to give Regina George an O-face. Cheered on by Charlotte, Aura goes to work on seducing Keith...that is, until she lets Jed move in with her family as a favor. Love triangle? I think so.
Hardened cinephiles are rolling their eyes right about now. Based on the above summary, you'd expect the picture to go one of two ways. It could be A) a paint-by-the-numbers rom-com with a deficit of wit and a surplus of pop songs or B) a cloyingly pretentious, artier-than-thou indie that assembles soft-spoken hipsters and then sets them off on immaculately photographed bouts of mental masturbation.
Lucky for us, it's neither. It's a special breed all it's own- a wonderfully unique dramedy with all the endearing drollery of a Preston Surges movie, a generous helping of Allen-esque existential angst, and a dash of the feed-'em-to-the-dogs ruthlessness of recent minor classics like Heathers and Election. For a relative n00b in the director's chair, Dunham has an uncanny mastery of balance; she can do Tina Fey-worthy one-liners ("Hello. You look like the epilogue of Felicity"), and proves an expert assembler of knockout comic setpieces (by far the funniest "animal-in-the-house" episode since that Buick-sized spider in Annie Hall), but her real strengths lies in knowing that, while those features make a movie memorable, they do not make it good.
What's needed, even more than a story, are characters you can get behind. Just ask Jim Jarmusch or Jerry Seinfeld, strikingly diverse artists who forged highly successful careers by dropping strikingly original personalities into bare-bones plotlines. Here, Dunham's work suggests she could be a fellow Master of Nothing. Notice how, when summarizing the film, I included very few major plot points-there are really only four or five. What I spent alot of time on are the people, creations that pop with a real-life immediacy that gets rarer and rarer every movie season.
Dunham understands that people, by their nature, are contradictory, and conveys a sense of the human condition's frailty by establishing character traits until these people fly in the face of them. Nadine appears to be a stuck-up ubersnob, until she proffers an unexpectedly sweet response to something Aura says. We've put Jed in the sweet-but-scruffy category until the screenplay makes a daring decision involving his screen presence. And then there's Siri, who, after spending the entire movie in a state of out-to-lunch apathy, steps into the spotlight for a deeply haunting closing monologue that ends the proceedings on a note of mournful understanding and hard-earned wisdom. I don't need to analyze these scenes anymore. They stand alone. When you see the movie, they speak for themselves, and, more importantly, they speak to you.
So why do I like this movie so much? Why am I campaigning for it like few other indie pieces I've seen? Probably because it does something I've wanted the cinema to do for a good while. The Graduate was a perfect account of the 60's generation, of the between-this-and-that ennui that drove so many to turn on and drop out. On the threshold of maturity, they saw infinity roll out before them. They had all the time in the world but yet not concrete ambitions to fill it with. After the attack-and-natural-disaster prone 90's and 00's, something changed, I think.
The uncertainty was still there, but we gained a newfound urge to fill our time as much as possible-to take up X amount of jobs, X amount of AP classes, to apply to this many colleges, try this many things with that many lovers, explore all we wanted and latch onto some purpose in case the increasing random whims of the world wiped us away tomorrow. Instead of standing in buzzy bliss before the endlessness of time, we felt at its mercy. This movie captures that newfound restlessness with biting exactitude, especially in its beautiful final line. The Graduate is one of my all-time favorites, so a movie that may be the new-millennium equivalent of that tour de force certainly deserves my attention and unchecked praise.
One final screed: some are discounting Lena Dunham's efforts because the picture's based on her real life experiences-she's an Oberlin film grad, the picture was shot in her actual loft, and her real life mother and sister play her movie family-but I find it absurd that the picture's autobiographical nature is being tallied as a negative. It takes balls to put any fragment of your past up on screen, and we ought to praise Dunham for putting it on display for the sake of her art. But it doesn't matter whether this movie is real or fake, half-imagined or completely facutal; it's something better than any of the aforementioned qualities; honest. A.
PS. For those who won't bother to see the picture (it's available on cable On Demand, and headed to DVD-store shelves), I can't resist sharing my favorite line;
Partygoer: "I love your dress!"
Lena: "I think it screams 'I've been living in Ohio for four years, now take me back to your gross apartment and have sex with me!'....but....uh....thank you...."
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