The Puffy Chair / Safety Not Guaranteed

So, apparently I never posted my thoughts on Cyrus or The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, and when I wrote about Jeff, Who Lives at Home, I was kind of meh about it. This is odd, because I have in the meantime decided that I Like the Duplass Brothers' movies, and I'm surprised I never said so before. All three of those films, I think, are in some ways kind of exactly what you'd expect a quirky, small, independent American film to be, but hey, they work. They find a fine balance between sweetness and sap, comic and melancholy, acerbic and tender. The characters are odd but believable, the situations ridiculous yet somehow familiar. So, I was looking forward to seeing The Puffy Chair, having heard it was one of their better works, and indeed, it was exactly what I expected, and I loved it. My boyfriend, who has not seen as many of their movies and was not entering into it with the same expectations, was rather less impressed. But I thought i was extremely clever. Then, a week later, I watched Safety Not Guaranteed. I thought it was also a Duplass brothers film, and was somewhat puzzled, watching it, because it seemed sort of in their wheelhouse, but not nearly as well done. Turns out, it's just that Mark Duplass stars in it -- neither brother seems to have been involved in the writing or directing. And it shows -- the movie is sort of charmingly quirky and has an original plot, but the tone is slightly off, and it's a bit too mopey-sappy, and overall much less clever. Not a bad movie, just not an especially great one. Definitely would've been better if the Duplass brothers had done it...

The thing is, the Duplass bros are very skilled at the craft of writing. Their plots have this elegant construction; a dense network of repetitions and allusions and resurfacing motifs and reversals that makes my analytical engine purr. The Puffy Chair begins on the eve of a guy's departure on a brief road trip: he will pick up a chair that he bought from a guy on craigslist and deliver it to his father as a surprise birthday present. He's having dinner with his girlfriend, and it rapidly becomes clear that there are some definite problems in their relationship. Minor scuffles? The kinds of arguments couples have as they're transitioning into a more serious relationship and jockeying for position in setting personal boundaries? Or symptoms of major underlying incompatibilities? We can't tell. But the result is, she is now going on the trip with him. They stop by his brother's house on the way, and lo and behold, then there were three. So now we have this somewhat tense relationship, plus this wackadoo unpredictable hippy brother. And hilarious hijinx ensue.

What's so great about this film is the way it conveys a sense of absurdity in these fantastically trivial yet strangely insurmountable obstacles, and the way they escalate. A guy dramatically trapped in a van and unable to go to the bathroom that is a mere 10 feet away, for a totally stupid yet completely understandable reason. A screaming fight where a guy simply will not open a door. How ridiculous is it to make threats at someone who is safely behind a closed door? Bragaddocio and the struggle to reconcile sensitivity and masculinity are a wonderful subplot in the movie, as is the balance between laid back emo hippy-ness and pragmatic rationality, and of course, how relationships work, and how you know if someone is truly "the one." It's a warm and tender movie that is also hilariously funny and fantastically clever. Highly recommended (by me. Less so by my boyfriend).

Safety Not Guaranteed has a more unconventional storyline -- a journalist and his two interns try to write a story about a guy (played by Mark Duplass) who has placed an ad in the paper looking for someone to time travel with him. Who is this kook? is the initial angle, but one of the interns, a somewhat troubled young woman, begins to form a relationship with the guy. So, at this point, I'm cringing because you know, inevitably the dude will realize she's been lying to him, and that will be no good. What's worse is that the movie is leaving it open-ended as to whether or not this guy is a kook. Socially maladjusted, no doubt. Actually crazy? Unclear. Are we meant to like him, or mock him? Unsure. Which really alienates me as a viewer, and makes me very uncomfortable. Meanwhile, the main journalist is also visiting an old fling, and trying to get the other intern, a nerdy South Asian guy, laid. At its best moments, the movie offers scenes of what feels like genuine, honest interactions between people, and interesting echoes among these various situations. The ambivalent space between seeing someone as a misunderstood genius or a person with serious mental problems or just a jerk is not uninteresting, but it's difficult to pull off, and this film doesn't quite succeed. Also, the mopey indie rock soundtrack is borderline unbearable for me.

Whereas Safety Not Guaranteed feels a bit precious and contrived, The Puffy Chair, to me at least, had this amazing quasi-documentary effect, where it felt like it was just showing you some stuff that happened, rather than dutifully following along the steps of a plot. Its quirky characters were decidedly imperfect, and occasionally seemed like complete jerks, but they always seemed compelling to me somehow, even when I didn't like them. Whereas in Safety Not Guaranteed, the characters skated dangerously close to cliche, and many of their eccentricities seemed designed specifically to make them seem more real, but did the opposite. Thus, the emotional developments between them seemed to proceed along exactly the lines you'd expect, and felt somewhat hollow. Whereas in The Puffy Chair, you had a sense that anything could happen, and the things that did not happen resonated beautifully with other moments of the plot but never seemed dictated by them. It's a really artful construction, and my favorite kind, where the creators manage to find this delicate balance between organization and chaos, inviting you to perceive patterns in reality without making you feel like they have created them.