OVER DUN-HAM Lena’s latest should be the final nail in her career coffin
WHAT ever happened to Lena Dunham? Once a top talent, now she has written and directed a cinematic javelin to the head appropriately called “Sharp Stick” that premiered over the weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.
The “Girls” creator’s second movie after 2010’s “Tiny Furniture” is hollow, amateurish provocation with phony characters and an off-putting plot. Nonetheless, in a post-screening Q&A, Dunham ran down its many highminded inspirations.
She said she wanted to “give porn its due as something that can be really healing.” And, as a woman who can’t have biological children due to a hysterectomy, Dunham, 35, wished to tell a story about “what it means to make your own family . . . and how that’s just as meaningful.”
Yes, it is. But does that beautiful message come during the scene when the 26-year-old main character Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) scrawls an A-to-Z list of sex acts on colorful construction paper that she’d like to try out with randos? Or when her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a vocab lesson on a crude nickname for the male anatomy?
Sarah Jo’s sister Treina (Taylour Paige) is adopted, true, but the world is already in universal agreement that adoption is a great thing to do. This is not some ingenious Dunham revelation.
It’s not believable
As for the lead, unless you’re directing a reboot of “Strawberry Shortcake,” your real-world, liveaction main character should not behave like a two-dimensional, smiley, brainwashed cultist. Sarah Jo is as annoying as the Mister Softee truck and sticks around for just as long. She’s laughably naive and sweet and the explanation for her strangeness strains credulity.
Sarah Jo had a radical hysterectomy at a young age and, according to Dunham, that experience made her a happy hermit.
So, even though she is nearly 30 in Los Angeles and lives with her hippie mom who puts ice cubes in chardonnay as she regales her daughters with stories of her own past sexcapades, Sarah Jo acts like she barely knows what sex is. Come on.
Feeling left out and unwanted because of her surgery scars, she decides to awkwardly seduce the hyperactive older father of a special needs child she takes care of. Sarah Jo and Josh (Jon Bernthal) begin a fumbling affair. (Dunham, a tad stiff, plays his pregnant wife). And then he introduces his young employee to porn, which — even though she owns a laptop and helps her sister film TikTok dances — she is also blithely unaware of.
Meet the one adult woman who’s never seen a pop-up ad!
Things are already weird, but the film turns ridiculous when Sarah Jo becomes obsessed with a feminist male porn star (Scott Speedman). Then, she gets on dating apps and tries to hook up with as many men as possible.
Very few laughs
“Sharp Stick” is meant to be a very funny coming-of-age tale, but we rarely laugh because we don’t believe a nanosecond of it.
“Girls” was a defining TV show for an entire generation, and certainly the last half-hour comedy until “And Just Like That” to regularly become a talker the next morning. The series was funny because it was real. Everybody knows a Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, Shoshana and Adam. Sarah Jo, on the other hand, is pure, ridiculous fiction in service of Dunham’s wild theses.
Dunham, it seems, has fallen harder for courting controversy these days than telling the honest stories that made her famous in the first place.