CIFF Diary: The Puffy Chair

I wasn't immediately taken with The Puffy Chair, when I first saw it last spring at SXSW. The dictionary definition of "unassuming", the video-shot road trip comedy of discomfiture follows the disintegration of Josh (Mark Duplass) and Emily (Kathryn Aselton), a couple whose multi-year relationship melts down when Emily accompanies Josh and his brother Rhett (Rhett Wilkins) on a roadtrip to his parents' house. A minor hit at Sundance, it eventually won the Emerging Visions award at SXSW, and already halfway through that festival a kind of Puffy Chair mania seemed to be in the air. In short, I think my hype allergy flared up before I had even seen it; I walked out of the film's screening at the Paramount Theater and prompty shrugged. But in the months since, I haven't been able to get its first sequence out of my head, and so I made a point to see it again at CIFF.

Puffy opens on a tight, shaky shot of Duplass (the film's screenwriter and co-producer, as well as its star; it was directed by his brother Jay, and "executive produced" by their parents) goofily dancing with a fried chicken drumstick in his hand. The handheld shot opens up to reveal Josh and Emily, sitting across from one another at a kitchen table, deep in the middle of what we'll soon realise is an all-too-rare moment of euphoria for them. And the mood starts to fall apart as soon as we're in it: when Josh thanks his girlfriend for making him dinner, Emily quickly slips into baby talk – all the better to passive-aggressively express her displeasure over Josh's impending journey. "I wanted to make sure you knew what you were leaving behind," she coos insistently. "I wanted to make sure you knew how much you were going to miss me." Josh plays along: "I know," he sings, trying to match her register. "So much I'm going to die." Without dropping the affectation, he drops some exposition: the trip is really important to him; he's really looking forward to getting out on the road; he's eager to get away. Emily suddenly drops the singsong act – and if this is her standard cadence, it's no wonder Josh needs a vacation: "Yeah, I know," she snaps. Josh's cell phone rings, and he takes the call. Within moments, the attention-hungry Emily has upended the dinner table and stormed out of the apartment. "Just the TV," Josh says into the phone. "I'm ... I'm gonna go turn it off." Needless to say, the happy, dancing, fried chicken reverie has been completely lost.


What's the problem with these two? It's hard to say, and that's ultimately what The Puffy Chair gets so right: this is one of those relationships that's clearly doomed, but it's impossible to diagnose a single, fatal problem. Emily is incredibly beautiful, with translucent pink-and-white skin and soft green eyes, but she's obviously a nightmare - a controlling, insecure schrew who disguises her self-obsession as concern for "the relationship". Josh is just as pretty - wide, twinkly blue eyes, scruffy, sandy blonde hair, good bone structure and a lazy grin – and he's just as much of a monster. He's got a highly overinflated sense of his own cleverness, which turns around and bites him in the ass quite often, and he's constantly formulating new scams to cover up the scars.

They've probably been together too long already when we meet them, but if any one thing is tearing them apart, it's their dueling miscalculations about their future together. "Why do you love me?", Emily asks one late night, as Josh is drifting off to sleep. It's an unfair question, and it's the wrong time, but Josh does the worst possible thing in response by critiquing the question. She's an insecure mess, but if he can't come up with even one little reason, even if he doesn't really mean it, just to mollify her so that they can go to bed, then she's got good reason to be concerned.

All of this relationship drama lies underneath a jumble of situational comedy that works to various degrees. The titular chair is a giant, plush purple recliner that resembles a fixture of Josh and Rhett's childhood home; Josh has bought it on eBay as a birthday present for their dad, and the plan is to drive from New York to his parents' house in Atlanta, picking the chair up on the way. After the phone call incident, Josh takes a hint and invites Emily to join him; what was suppossed to be a brief visit with Rhett turns into a day-long sojourn, and soon the eccentric brother, having decided that he "need[s] to reconncect with Dad, dude," is along for the ride. The chair itself is a cigarette-burned disgrace, and the trio finds themselves stranded whilst waiting for it to be reupholstered. By the time they arrive on the parents' doorstep, our heroes are battered and literally broken; though the last two scenes of the film are two of the best, a lot of energy has been squandered just getting to them. There's not a single scene that completely fails, but the further the proceedings travel from Josh and Emily's relationship, the more it feels like the Brothers are scrambling to fill space.

The Puffy Chair looks really good, for what is obviously a film made on pocket change, shot naturalistically with prosumer materials. A perfect soundtrack, based on indie rock source cues from Death Cab for Cutie, Spoon and others, helps to amp-up the professionalism considerably. The script is sometimes contrived ("You want me to be this dude, that I am not!") But mostly it's amazing how it nails the mealy-mouthed way people my age have of saying what we mean by dressing the same words, over and over again, in different kinds of inflection. Between Rhett and Josh, the word "dude" has a thousand meanings; Emily isn't satisifed being referred to by any of them. Fleshing out that tension, between what is being said and what it obviously means, is where The Puffy Chair really succeeds.