Review: The Puffy Chair

The Puffy Chair never quite strikes a comfortable or graceful balance between silliness and solemnity.

The Puffy Chair
Photo: Roadside Attractions

As in Andrew Bujalski’s films, The Puffy Chair’s characters inhabit a world where everyone seems to have signed off on a pledge of solipsism, their every conversation and undertaking an egomaniacal reflection of their refusal to grow up. From its middling lo-fi aesthetic (including intermittent losses of focus) and twentysomething slacker protagonists to its painfully abrupt ending, Jay Duplass’s first feature resembles a more amusing yet less lyrical cousin of Funny Ha Ha, following former indie rocker-turned-booking agent Josh (Mark Duplass) as he travels from NYC to Atlanta in order to deliver the titular La-Z-Boy—an exact replica of one from his youth—to his father as a birthday present.

Accompanied by his commitment-craving girlfriend, Emily (Kathryn Aselton), and his New Age-y brother, Rhett (Rhett Wilkins), Josh is seemingly setting off on a small-scale odyssey of enlightenment, though the realizations that he comes to along the way aren’t necessarily of the encouraging or heartwarming variety. Incapable of engaging anyone in meaningful dialogue—whether it be Emily during pillow talk, or the eBay charlatan from whom he’s purchased the puffy chair—Josh is a man-child whose general inarticulateness reflects a larger unwillingness to responsibly face up to life, an affliction that also plagues the foolishly optimistic Emily and the inconsiderately air-headed Rhett.

The trio’s ill-advised decisions prove mildly fertile ground for laughs, with an impromptu wedding scene between Rhett and a woman he’s just met at a movie theater benefiting from Josh’s telling passive-aggressiveness, while the filmmskers shrewdly downplay their slightly clunky central motif—the reupholstered chair as symbol of Josh’s attempted makeover into an adult—in favor of focusing on the road-trippers’ free-flowing discourse. But despite the naturalistic rapport between Mark Duplass and Aselton (filled with unbearable lovey-dovey cooing and Josh calling Emily “dude”), the film never quite strikes a comfortable or graceful balance between silliness and solemnity, so that when the informal story eventually transforms into a sobering portrait of a crumbling relationship, the effect—compounded by the often-unlikable self-involvement of its characters—is more off-putting than appealing.

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Score: 
 Cast: Mark Duplass, Kathryn Aselton, Rhett Wilkins, Julie Fischer, Bari Hyman, Gerald Finnegan  Director: Jay Duplass  Screenwriter: Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass  Distributor: Roadside Attractions  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: R  Year: 2005  Buy: Video

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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