Tiny Triumph Over Glory

[Tiny Furniture]

Directed by Lena Dunham

At IFC Center

Runtime:  98 min.

Morning Glory

Directed by Roger Michell

Runtime:  102 min.

Rarely do we get a clear cut example of indie filmmaking that is more honest and artful than the Hollywood brand, but [Tiny Furniture] exposes the utter nonsense of Morning Glory. Both movies showcase the pampered, self-centered middle class but actress-writer-director Lena Dunham makes that attitude the subject of Tiny Furniture while Morning Glory, rehashing the tired sitcom premise of backstage intrigue in network television, disguises the fact of class privilege and dominance.  

[Indie Dunham], in her low-budget debut, plays Aura, a recent college graduate who returns home to her artist-mother’s Manhattan loft with nothing to do but endure her leisure. In Morning Glory, Hollywood Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, an eager-beaver New Jersey girl who lands a producing job at a low-rated New York morning show. Aura, whose name evokes pothead fantasies of the casual bourgeois elite, seeks to grasp some purpose to her cushy life; this hefty yet attractive, charming yet whiny white girl is a type recognizable from the world while Becky, who flirtatiously seeks success in media, is a limited yet superficial white girl type—mostly recognizable from television.

Tiny Furniture shows how class advantages can stunt a naive child of privilege while Morning Glory cutesifies the cynicism that social climbers buy into. “We do it for the money,” Becky says early on, but that’s cant, not a confession. Her sarcasm hides her ruthlessness which is mistaken for professionalism when she fires an anchorman on her first day. This nice-girl shark idea comes from James L. Brooks’ worst film, the utterly fake Broadcast News (1987) which sentimentalized the TV industry’s mendacity. Now, TV’s narcissism has become law of the land and Morning Glory expects audiences to be entertained by Becky’s exercise of vanity and her access to power. It’s poisonous comedy from the same screenwriter who did The Devil Wears Prada, Aline Brosh McKenna, a Harvard grad who apparently knows nothing about the world of work.

It is Dunham’s disregard of privilege, her indifference to social climbing, that provides Tiny Furniture’s disarmingly modest personal vision. Dunham laughs at class pretense and bears the impact of her own blitheness--the wounding annoyances of parental condescension, sibling rivalry, friendship obligation, workplace drudgery and casual sex. Her dilemma feminizes The Graduate then updates and localizes a generation’s moral drift--the post-Boomer set that blogs and films from New York as if it were the center of the universe. (Dunham knows its just tiny furniture.) This gentle self-criticism avoids the sentimentality of Azazel Jacobs’ similar Momma’s Boy. Dunham’s spoiled-brat diary (Aura takes cues from her mother’s own young adult diary) is frequently and surprisingly funny.

Morning Glory is just routine Hollywood dishonesty (with he mist annoying song-score since Juno) and wastes its stars. Diane Keaton as the middle-age TV host is overly crinkly. McAdams starts out imitating Keaton’s Annie Hall ditziness then coasts, using her own dimples and sexy mole on her left cheek. As the grumpy anchorman, Harrison Ford hasn’t been so phony since Working Girl and Regarding Henry misrepresented the modern world. Plus, he is saddled with fake gravitas, telling Becky: “News is a sacred temple and you’re part of the cabal that’s destroying it!” Ha!