Tiny Furniture

TINY FURNITURE should be commended - a young filmmaker uses her mom's loft and her actual mom and sister to play her mom and sister - shoots it on a HD video camera for about 50k and becomes an Indie Film darling! That is amazing and I love hearing stories like this. Dunham is very talented and there are great scenes in this movie but the rave reviews are waaaaay over the top. Slow down. The film just meanders - it starts to repeat itself and I found the ending lacking. I do not need everything all tied up in a bow for me and I love films that just mosey a long (Stranger in Paradise, etc.) but after awhile - the film does just seem like a bunch of scenes stitched together without any payoff of any kind. I get that many young people will totally relate with the story of a college graduate having no idea what to do with her life and Dunham is perfect in the role - in fact, it was refreshing to see a woman as a lead who looks like her - she is dumpy with thick legs, a big butt and she walks around a lot of the movie pantless - which is great - that's how a lot of people walk around in the privacy of their own home. I'm glad to hear this indie has led to a bunch of other projects for her - congrats. I hope she learns how to write a better story next time. (Oh - and the girl who plays her crazy friend Charlotte is absolutely terrific!!)

"I'm in a post-graduation malaise," Aura to her mother

Aura (Lena Dunham) and her mother (Laurie Simmons, Denham's real mom) are a generation apart, and it shows. In Tiny Furniture (a reference to her mother's collection) Aura has drifting back to mom by returning after graduation to their upscale Tribeca apartment, which her mother easily covers as a successful artist. Aura has no prospects to be so successful, struggling as she is just trying to sustain through a nowhere position as a restaurant hostess, not the filmmaker she'd like to be.

While the apartment is minimalist white, sharp, and clean, Aura is heavy, homely, and slow. The honesty of not casting a hottie as most directors would is one of the film's noble features, and that this director casts herself in unflattering circumstances (Aura has her first complete sex, boring I would say, in a street construction pipe and wears ill-fitting clothes) is a sign of the realism rare in most contemporary comedies about 20 somethings. In fact, director Dunham has achieved a universality anyway because the players in this comedy aren't a whole lot different from the young sit-com residents of the last 30 years, except they all had jobs or prospects, and alas, Aura has none.

I didn't enjoy the film as I had hoped because except for the pipe and some smart Juno-like dialogue at the beginning with her sister and her mom, nothing much at all happens. If you compare Tiny Furniture with Manhattan-based Seinfeld, where it's about nothing but really something, then this is a tiny comedy where shifting around the furniture still results in a boring set up.

Written and directed by Lena Dunham, who also acted the part of the lead character, Aura, "Tiny Furniture" is a worthy accomplishment for a variety of reasons. Most importantly - with a budget of $50K - it demonstrates the production quality that can be achieved with minimal funds and a skeleton crew. The film tells the story of a young woman, just graduated from from film studies at Oberlin and upset over a recent romantic break-up, who returns to her artist mother's Tribeca apartment in New York where a younger sister also resides. Even if the storyline is seriously thin, the result is a witty look at the supposedly crucial dilemmas of an immature, privileged, self-absorbed female college graduate who finds herself on the threshold of adulthood. Coincidentally (or probably not) this narrative framework mirrored Ms Dunham's real-life circumstances at the time when she made the film - and she utilized her own mother, sister and friends to play their respective parts in this fictionalized version of her homecoming.

The film leads us through a sequence of Aura's everyday issues that she consistently turns into minor melodramas. These include communication issues with her mother, free-loading boyfriends, infantile sibling rivalry confrontations, employment problems and humiliating sexual misadventures - all of which are portrayed with a mixture of ironic humor and pathos. "Tiny Furniture" is beautifully photographed on a Canon Digital SLR, and the entire cast give appropriately cosmopolitan performances, with Jemima Kirke stealing the show as Aura's hilariously out-to-lunch BFF Charlotte.

The saga of the Millennial college graduate who moves back home and begins a maddening search for direction — that's what Lena Dunham sets off to depict in "Tiny Furniture" and she does it in the most Millennial way possible: completely DIY including casting her mother and sister to play — her mother and sister.

Dunham captures the mundanity of post-undergrad life at home, even though her character Aura's life is a little more unusual; home is a Manhattan loft where mom (Laurie Simmons) is an a photographer/visual artist (she actually is in real life) of solid notoriety. Sister Nadine (Grace Dunham) lives there too, but she's in the no-pressure zone of high school. There isn't so much a plot synopsis as a list of friends new and old and other influences who make Aura's new life as a young adult and dreams of becoming a successful artist complicated and messy.

The authenticity of Dunham's voice as a writer rings clear. A lot of it is the semi- autobiographical form; it's impossible for any peers watching (and maybe some a little older) not to relate in some way to Aura's "struggle." It might be nice if more stuff happened in the film instead of a whole lot of stuff that could be stuff but doesn't ever become stuff, but there's also something refreshing about taking it in as a contemporary portrait of an emerging generation. Also, you could argue that there's a certain poetic truth to the fact that nothing really happens.

The "action" is how Aura navigates internal and external pressures. Everyone around her, for example, seems to have found a measure of success. Her mother, for one, has been successful forever; she meets a successful-ish YouTube star in Jed (Alex Karpovsky) who's talking to networks about a TV show and even her sister was recognized nationally for her poetry, which Aura can't help but demean. Then there's her oldest childhood friend, Charlotte (Jemima Kirke, Dunham's actually oldest childhood friend) who sports the couldn't-care-less attitude that plays in contrast to it all.

Aura's first foray into the "real world" involves getting a job, since that's what people are supposed to do, but of course being a daytime closed-hours hostess at a restaurant is a far cry from her aspirations, even though she seems to believe its in her best interest. Throughout the course of the film, Dunham exposes a bit more of Aura's psychology, namely the complex nature of her relationship to her family and home in the specific and broadest sense.

Done for as low a budget as possible, the actors here are all amateurs but it doesn't show. Dunham's strength is obviously her writing, but she's a sufficient stand in for the average 22-year-old, and as a director, she makes the most of it with some interesting shot framing to bring varying perspectives to the talk-heavy action.

"Tiny Furniture" is a really impressive debut for a fledgling filmmaker, especially one whose talent is writing and simply needed to round up a cast and crew to realize her story into some kind of finished product. It could certainly use a plot, but Dunham is able to effectively touch on the melange of post-college emotions in the 21st century in a way that's yet to be articulated, and which she effectively continued to expound upon in her HBO series "Girls," which this movie made possible.

Dunham recognizes the complexity of her generation. There is a self-centered component, there's a familial dependency, but there's also a mixed bag of influences and life philosophies that can take hold of the wheel at any moment. We are pitiable and pitiful, lost yet driven, naive and all too aware of how the world works.

~Steven C

Thanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

Certainly this film will not be everyone's cup of tea. But I'm a sucker for movies that are light on plot and heavy on letting us just hang out with some interesting characters for awhile. The dialogue here is so natural I thought perhaps they were simply ad libbing. The chemistry between the mother and daughters is totally real (makes sense -- they are a real family), and the film perfectly captures the that feeling of lacking any direction following graduation from college. It's true that nothing much happens in the film -- it's more about the nature of relationships: renewing old ones, letting friends go, trying out new lovers, choosing the wrong people -- all while trying to figure out what it means to be an adult.