Movie Review & Ticket Giveaway: The Puffy Chair

When you’re in your mid-twenties everything seems so damn important. And by everything, we mean everything that happens to you, everything you think, everything you desire or fear. The stakes are seemingly always raised, and as the 1/3-life crisis approaches, melodrama can be ubiquitous. You later realize that most of the drama and anxiety is self-imposed. By failing to make hard choices or take responsibility for our actions, we perpetuate a world of confused emotions for ourselves, one that can usually be easily reconciled by taking a breath, stepping back and garnering a little bit of perspective. But, for the most part, this dance must play itself out, and as the saying goes, it takes two to tango. And three-or-more for a good hokey pokey. So, add the ever-present reality of complicating others’ lives with our own indecision, and the combination can oftentimes be combustible.

Jay annd Mark Duplass's new film The Puffy Chair (winner of the Audience Award at SXSW 2005) examines what happens when people’s insecurities and unspoken desires eventually collide. The film opens with arguably its most powerful scene. Josh (Mark Duplass) and girlfriend Emily (Kathryn Aselton) are picking over dinner in their small New York City apartment. The handheld camera shots show a cute couple enjoying some chicken, but below the surface, tensions bubble. Hidden within the seemingly innocent relationship small talk, Emily employs that oft passive-aggressive device we know all too well: baby-talk. Her playful manner of conversing with Josh belies her emotional instability regarding his decision to set out on a brief road trip without her; thus the fuse has been lit to a conversation that will eventually explode in Josh’s face, giving the audience an immediate understanding that not all is right in this relationship.

“I wanted to make sure you knew what you were leaving behind," she says coyly in her best sing-song. "I wanted to make sure you knew how much you were going to miss me."

Whoa! Run, Josh, run. We know this type of communication. This is one of those lines not said out of playfulness or a mock-needling. It is a passive-aggressive way for her to attempt to grab on to Josh and guilt him into not leaving her, if only for a day or two - a strategy bound to breed contempt in her boyfriend, despite his inability to remove himself from her clutches. After all, she is unbelievably adorable, when she is not being a mildly psychotic mess of neuroses.

From the beginning, it is clear that these two are not able to communicate, nor are they sensitive to one another’s needs. The Duplass brothers paint Emily as a needy, manipulative girlfriend who is determined to get no satisfaction. She constantly puts Josh in a position to give her specific answers to questions she probably doesn’t really want answered. Emily lashes out with emotionally charged responses when his answers to not jive with whatever “correct” answer Emily had hoped to hear. The problem is Josh doesn’t know the right answers, but instead of communicating that, the self-involved boyfriend complicates his own situation by presuming he can be clever enough to extricate himself time and again from the drama without serious repercussions.

All of the drama in the opening scene surrounds Josh’s plan to take a trip to pick up a certain Puffy Chair that he intends to deliver to his dad as a birthday present. Emily, not surprisingly, guilts Josh into take her along for the ride. On the way down south (a metaphoric decent into relationship hell), the couple stops by Josh’s brother Rhett’s (Rhett Wilkins) house for what they hope will be a quick visit. The novice naturalist filmmaker Rhett convinces Josh that he, too, should make the trip to see their father, because he suddenly needs to “reconnect.” Josh, as is his wont, capitulates then bemoans a situation that he ostensibly created. He constantly refuses to take responsibility for the decisions he makes, further exacerbating his girlfriend’s frustration, though she veils her anger behind her pouting resignation.

The trio’s quest for the chair takes them on a trip that brings out the worst in each of them, but the comedic events of their plight and the frantic comedy of the situations in which they unfortunately find themselves works to diffuse the overwhelming anxiety and anger that each of the character feels. Much as with non-fiction, the comedic devices in this piece of cinematic realism postpone the inevitable deterioration of interpersonal relationships By the end of the trip there will be casualties, personal and material. But all’s fair in love and war.

The Puffy Chair opens in Austin this Friday.
Showtimes

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