A while back a younger cinephile friend pressed The Puffy Chair on the cinetrix. When she finally got around to watching it, conditions were less than ideal, but only somewhat. The 'Fesser was puttering around in the kitchen, but even that almost ambient noise had me cranking the volume just to hear what the Duplass Brothers' characters had to say for themselves.
I wish more of it was worth hearing. [There may be something to that mumblecore tag after all.] In this entry in the indie canon of white boys and their problems caught on prosumer DV, self-involved Josh attempts to save his on-the-skids romance with marriage-minded Emily by inviting her along on an eBay errand to fetch the titular chaise as a present for his dad. Along the way they pick up Josh's hapless brother Rhett, who resembles Buster Bluth made over as a madrassa student. Hilarity, as the kids say, ensues.
Don't get me wrong. There are some well-observed set pieces, chief among them Josh's encounter with the Southern seller of the puffy chair, which--surprise!--doesn't resemble the posted picture. The cinetrix experienced a full-on "don't go into the basement!" feeling of horrified familiarity watching his confrontational New York attitude clash with the "Well, bless your heart, Yankee asshole. I'm a fixin' to move slower now" slyness of the duplicitous furniture shiller. [Hell, even the cinetrix knows enough to cop an aw-shucks flittery politesse when the occasion calls for it.]
The whirlwind romance between Rhett and local gal Amber is also a keeper, boozy and yearning and lit with fairy lights. But, unlike Emily, I had a hard time believing that grown-up love was ever possible for either of these overgrown boys.
When the film ends--and I do mean ends--the cinetrix suspects that viewers are supposed to wrestle with the abruptness and the ambiguity, but she just felt relieved to leap out of the Chair and bid the whole lot good riddance.
I should note that the DVD comes packaged with three shorts. The ones about recording an outgoing message and staging an intervention are mildly amusing, in the Duplass's chosen "dude" idiom. Only "Scrapple" goes one step beyond, giving us a couple's Scrabble game that gets physically and emotionally violent until, big surprise, the guy admits he thinks he's smarter than his girlfriend. This confession spells out the Duplass Brothers' world view pretty concisely, which may be why the cinetrix wasn't so taken by their games.
