Review: Tiny Furniture

Tiny Furniture is a not a story. A story has an exposition, a climax, and falling action. Since films tell stories, many follow this rubric of dramatic action. Tiny Furniture is a reflection of life. Like life, it is filled with small ups and downs and small personal crises. It doesn’t always follow the neat construction of a story. When Aura moves home after graduating from college, she is forced to reconcile her worthless major in film theory with her lack of motivation and direction. The result is a frustrating and stagnant portrait of a frustrating and stagnant time in a young person’s life.

            Aura, Lena Dunham, moves back into her parents’ house in New York City without much ceremony, just after graduation. Freshly broken up with her longtime college boyfriend and with no career plans to speak of, she gets a job as a hostess at a local restaurant. Since her sister Nadine, Grace Dunham, and her mother Siri, Laurie Simmons, couldn’t care less that she is home, Aura fills her time reconnecting with her crazy childhood friend Charlotte, Jemima Kirke. Through her she meets Jed, Alex Karpovsky, who soon becomes a leech-like house guest not at all interested in Aura, romantically or socially. With that relationship going nowhere, Aura tries to kindle one with the chef at work, Keith, David Call. While there seems to be a connection, Aura Keith’s girlfriend thwarts her efforts. When he reveals they are unhappy, Aura takes her chance and they share a brief sexual encounter that leads nowhere. Aura quits her job, kicks Jed out of the house as demanded by her mother, and finds her relationship with Keith at a dead end. The film ends without ceremony, the same way it began.

            Lena Dunham not only starred in but directed and wrote the film as well. 24 years old at the time of its release and a recent graduate, you might say she relates easily to her character’s sudden upheaval into the real world. You would be correct in more ways than one. Lena Dunham can relate to her character easier than most because not only did she experience the same events as Aura, but her real life mother and sister play Aura’s mother and sister. Yes, Lena Dunham made a movie about her life, starring herself and her family, which takes place in her family’s real apartment. She turned her experience into a surreal example of art imitating life.

So if parts of the film seem amateur, it’s because they are amateur. Dunham’s sister and mother are not actors. Neither is Jemima Kirke, who plays Charlotte. At times, the film comes off as a cross between a documentary and a film school final project, but it’s also strangely compelling to watch. Dunham has no problem baring it all, which is probably why she felt so comfortable making a film that hits so close to home. She often appears on screen looking like she hasn’t showered. Other times she’s even in the shower, naked. Other times she’s just naked. It makes for a squeamish viewing, but one that reflects the ordinary rawness of real life. The dialogue feels casual and spontaneous, as if unplanned or unrehearsed. So faithfully true to life, parts of it come off as life sometimes is; dull. Subtle might be an understatement.  It walks a fine line between deliberate and random, sometimes coming up short in the momentum department. Still, it captures the essence of life while managing to keep the viewer intrigued and bewitched by the ordinary.

In Tiny Furniture, it is not so much what happens as what does not happen. Aura never can muster a relationship with Jed. She never finds a job worthy of her college degree. She refuses to move out of her parents’ house. Even when things do happen, they’re not life changing events, but subtle occurrences. She quits her job because she hates it. Her hamster dies. She finds her mother’s old diaries. That’s probably why the film is so frustrating to watch. Not without purpose, the lack of action in the plot echoes the lack of action in Aura’s life. Fresh out of college, she’s caught in between post-grad and pre-career. She is searching for the life she wants to live and the person she wants to become, but she doesn’t know where to start, nor does she make any attempts at starting. Her admittance into post-grad purgatory many can relate to, especially relevant in our current economic recession. Dunham doesn’t use dramatic story lines to illustrate post-graduate depression, but rather the lack of dramatic story lines. Aura’s life is a series of small failures and even smaller triumphs. Dunham’s script deliberately lacks action to parallel the lack of action in Aura’s life.

While Tiny Furniture made waves in the Indie film scene, the film inspired something much more groundbreaking; Girls. When Judd Apatow saw Dunham’s freshman film, he hired her to create a TV show for HBO. They worked together to create Girls, a show about four recent graduates trying to make it in NYC and failing a lot of the time. Endearing and true to life, Girls plays like a more polished version of Tiny Furniture. It immediately grabs and holds your attention with biting humor and relatable characters. While the story lines are realistic and typical for a post-grad, they are also more deliberate and dramatically motivated. Relevant and courageous, Girls blazes trails doing what no show has done before. It celebrates a group of fantastically flawed girls failing fantastically, and on occasion triumphing.

In the last scene of the movie, Aura crawls into her mother’s bed to tell her about her horrific one and only date with Keith. Even when she tells her the most jarring part of the story, Aura's mother shows little concern. Instead, she asks her to move a clock so that the ticking doesn’t keep her from sleeping. Aura moves it into the bathroom, but her mother can still hear it. “Yea but only a little bit, right?” Aura replies. No matter how far Aura puts real world responsibilities from her mind, she can still hear them ticking from the bathroom. The clock reminds her that they won’t go away. Even worse, time marches on regardless. Tiny Furniture is an unapologetic, understated portrait of a time in our lives when we just want to ignore the ticking clock.

Directed by Lena Dunham; Written by Lena Dunham; Produced by Kyle Martin and Alicia Van Couvering; With Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Grace Dunham, and Jemima Kirke, Alex Karpovsky; Runtime 98 minutes