The Puffy Chair

Director: Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass

2005 / 85min / DCP

If one of the defining features of mumblecore was exploring just how minimal a “concept” could be made to produce emotionally rich, compellingly intimate cinema, the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair—about one man’s (Mark Duplass) cross-country journey, with girlfriend Kati Aselton and brother Rhett Wilkins in tow, to pick up a La-Z-Boy recliner in Atlanta and deliver it to his dad as a birthday present—deserves especial credit for paring plot to the bone and deflating the overblown romance of the road movie. A La-Z Rider for the low-ambition millennial set, too wrapped up in quotidian concerns and petty grudges, like its characters, to get into any pretentious bluster about the American Dream.