Tiny Furniture really surprised my wife and me. We never went to see it when it was at IFC last year, because we were listening to the New York critics, who panned it. As usual, paying them any heed was a serious mistake. Tiny Furniture is a very enjoyable film.

I think Lena Dunham has the making of a very fine filmmaker. Her work in this film reminds me of the charming comedies of the 1990’s Indie Renessance, films like Walking and Talking, The Day Trippers, Party Girl, and others of that ilk. Tiny Furniture is not as artistically realized as those films – there is an element of post-millennial nonchalance and existential vacuousness here that puts a subtle drag on the whole enterprise. But what is immediately evident is how fresh all the comedy and characters seem when compared to similar indie comedies of the last 10 years. The pacing of the film is a touch slow, but it is amazingly and admirably even – the film never drags – and it is consistently funny and charming.

Dunham draws her characters really well, including the one she plays herself. They are all disoriented young people just out of school, and she resists making them too sophisticated. They all seem a touch small and dull – in other words, they seem pleasantly real. The two jerky men are just fabulous, especially the drippy YouTube “philosopher,” who is maybe the most beautiful portrait of a self-obsessed, judgmental, rude, opinionated A-hole that I have ever seen (very few films manage to keep this type of character “human-sized”.) Also fabulous is her best friend, a character so instantly and irrepressibly engaging that your attention jumps a level each time she comes into a scene.

The ending of the film is a bit disappointing – Dunham definitely misses one aspect of the light comedies of the 90’s Indie Renaissance: their brilliant and decidedly non-ambiguous endings. But despite this quibble, Tiny Furniture is one of very few genuinely good films I saw from 2011. I highly recommend it!