22 Family Movies Not To Watch With Your Family On Thanksgiving

Courtesy of IFC Films.

Tiny Furniture

In Lena Dunham’s first feature, which she wrote, directed, and stars in, we follow Aura, a very recent college graduate who is not doing well at all. She moves back home to live with her mother and sister, both intellectuals who appear much more capable and driven than she. Her friends are all narcissists who just want to party. She can’t bring herself to find a job of substance. And she feels fully misunderstood by her family and utterly lost in the aftermath of graduation. It’s a simple plot, one we’ve definitely seen before, but the hyper-realism of Dunham’s characters mixed with the slow, almost docu-style scenes that play out in front of us like real life make it all the more interesting.

As immediately happened when her show Girls premiered, this movie received some criticism for romanticizing privileged young New Yorkers. In most criticism, there was an underlying hum of “we don’t want to watch a 20-something figure out her life and whine about her feelings.” This, of course, we already knew: that’s why, for a while, there was only one singular show on television about young women figuring out their lives and working through their feelings and IT WAS CALLED GIRLS. But for those of us living this experience, it didn’t feel like watching a whiny girl refuse to help herself move on. It felt like an intentionally highly fictionalized version of us. Graduating is hard, transitioning is hard, being a young woman in the world is hard. Hell, we can’t even make movies about how being a young woman in the world is hard without being told to stop whining! But this movie, despite its minimal plot, does a lot to help us not feel totally alone, to quell our fears about being the only ones incapable of getting our lives on track, and to remind us that being sad and lost, though annoying to some, is a reality to most at some point in our lives. Also, she puts a dead hamster named Gilda into her freezer, so you KNOW you’re in for some good content.

Especially avoid if: You’re a recent graduate and you don’t respond well to realism. This is one of those things that I want to tell all those graduating to watch, but I simultaneously want to tell them to wait a few years until the sting wears off. If you’re a “work through it no matter what” kinda person, watch this, cry about it, and move on. If you’re an escapist, or if you’re one of those fun people who are for some reason offended by movies wherein young women don’t remain completely silent about their very real experiences: stay far away, please.