Every once in a while Hollywood likes to take a movie like Tiny Furniture, where a young filmmaker cobbles together every little bit of money and resources at their disposal, makes a small scale independent film, and actually gets it seen, and turn it into a success story. And who can blame them? It’s pretty impressive how far a movie this small, that stars filmmaker Lena Dunham’s real family and is set in their real apartment, went. But what I wasn’t very impressed by was the movie itself.
I hesitate to use the word hipster when writing a movie review, but in this case I feel sort of forced. This story about wealthy white people in their mid twenties making mountains out of molehill problems seems so concerned with having cred and earning cool points that it comes off as being very self-conscious. Almost to the point of making me uncomfortable when I was watching it. So yeah, this thing is obnoxiously hipster. And melodramatic. The protagonist acts like she’s 12-years-old, whining and crying about everything, getting into screaming matches with her mother and sister over nothing, and constantly trying to sleep in her mother’s bed like a little child. I get that there was some commentary about the fear of progressing into adulthood going on here, but when not coupled with any sort of concrete conflict or forward moving narrative the whole thing ends up about as entertaining as watching a little kid throw a temper tantrum.
And what was the deal with Dunham showing off her body so much? We watch her shave her legs in the bathtub, squeeze herself into unflattering tights. There’s shots that seem to be framed to focus on her pimples, multiple comments about how sweaty she is, and all seemingly to no end. There’s no point where she learns to accept her body in this movie, or any indication that this is even one of the conflicts of the film. So what was the point? It felt like I was getting hit over the head with some sort of feminist manifesto “teaching” me that normal looking girls can be in movies too. Well thank you for that wisdom. The camera work here isn’t poor, and every once in a while there’s wit in the endless rambling, but ultimately I found that this one had very little to offer. As a filmmaker Dunham knows how to stick to a story that she can pull off given her limitations (naturalist dialogue, real locations, no dynamic camera movements), but her limitations seem to be so great that there’s no reason for her to be telling a story at all.
