THE GAME of climbing artists and credulous fans—foxes and geese—provides some of the satire in the severely attenuated Tiny Furniture, a New York indie phenom that’ll seem like a different film than the one you’re hearing praised so much. As is said of a talentless YouTube artist Jed (Alex Karpovsky), Tiny Furniture “is a little bit famous in the Internet way.” Director/star/writer Lena Dunham filmed Tiny Furniture mostly in her family home, a Tribeca loft where her mother, the noted artist Laurie Simmons, plays the mom role, Siri. Dunham herself acts the role of the semiautobiographical 22-year-old Aura. Just out of college, Aura has no prospects. Her boyfriend dumped her and her hamster died.
Aura flaunts what it is diplomatic to call an untraditionally beautiful body. Aura or Dunham (where the dividing line between the two lies is a matter of opinion) does “fat is a feminist issue” videos of herself, bikini-clad, primping in the fountain of her college quad. And she endures the predictable “Thar she blows!”–style witticisms from YouTube’s ever-enlightened vox populi. Going pantsless and dressing in front of the camera, Dunham exposes a lot of herself as a girl who is in so many ways a self-involved whiner. Certainly there’s some courage here. But behind it is what, exactly?
While embodying a social problem of the moment—flights of boomerang children coming back home from college—Aura mopes over two different men. One is the aforementioned Jed, who films himself for YouTube sitting on a rocking horse and quoting Nietzsche. He’s a devious deadbeat who mooches his way into free shelter and drains Siri’s wine stash. Aura gets a sort-of job at a restaurant and fixates on a sous-chef, Keith (David Call), with a nasty tongue, an even nastier mustache and a girlfriend.
Dunham mopes well, and she’s believeable as the “I have to go home girl,” as she calls herself. Emoting the heartbreak she’s supposed to be suffering is beyond Dunham as an actress, though. For more involved acting of this kind of role, one has to see Tiny Furniture‘s strikingly similar antecedents: this year’s The Exploding Girl, or 2005’s Funny Ha Ha.
If anything, Tiny Furniture has earned its cachet back East for using words not commonly heard in today’s movies: “klonopin,” “gluten,” “DUMBO,” as in the name of a neighborhood not an elephant. Or maybe critics have praised Tiny Furniture because it’s the work of a young filmmaker who no one feels like crushing. Explaining her woes to her mom, Aura says, “I’m a young, young person, and I’m trying really hard.” It’s practically a plea to the audience.
Unrated; 98 min.
