Set almost entirely in a multi-unit Brooklyn brownstone, the edgy comedy Stress Positions assumes that acknowledgment is enough. It is easy to see some of ourselves in the characters, quasi-articulate thirtysomething New Yorkers who are barely holding it together in the throes of the COVID pandemic. They throw bad parties and drink too much, all in an effort to distract themselves. Writer and director Theda Hammel, who also co-stars, imagines a dysfunctional microcosm of a specific anxiety that no one – except for maybe COVID doomers who insist that pandemic never really ended – wants to relive again. Such an approach could be a funny, a nightmare journey down memory lane, and yet the conceit is too visceral for its own good. In her zeal to capture pandemic anxiety accurately, Hammel pushed for a level of realism that is downright unpleasant to revisit.
John Early plays Terry, a hapless protagonist and audience surrogate. It is summer 2020, and Terry is responsible for his nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a 19-year-old model from Morrocco who spends his time convalescing from his broken leg. Terry is a terrible caretaker probably because he is reeling from a breakup, so he distracts himself by hanging with Karla (Hammel), his best friend. Karla is a trans woman who is in a relationship with Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), a novelist who had modest success by writing about Karla’s life. Karla resents this, as she feels her life is no longer her own, and barely keeps that feeling below the surface. Her distraction? Flirting with her regular DoorDash driver, seemingly her only connection to the outside world. When she burns an American flag in an acknowledgment of the summer 2020 protests, it is out of boredom to jump on a bandwagon (we don’t hear the name George Floyd). Even in the throes of feigned outraged, no one ever leaves the building or adjacent patio.
Hammel gets the look of summer 2020 exactly right. Everything seems sticky and haphazard, just like you might expect when you’ve been stuck at home too long. All the characters look awful, unkempt and bleary-eyed. That accuracy also extends to the dialogue, which is brittle and mean. Terry and the others speak mostly in microaggressions or mini-tantrums, and Stress Positions attempts to find comedy in the kernel of truth that informs every slight. The trouble is how the performances are more painful than comic. Early can be a hilarious actor, and in his stand-up, he has become the soothsaying prophet of millennial angst. As Terry, his performance is a rare misfire, a deeply unlikable character whose frequent pratfalls barely register as karma for his pervasive selfishness. The only character who elevates the material is Karla, someone whose verbal dexterity matches her neurotic imagination. There is a party scene where she dresses down Terry so mercilessly and thoroughly that it almost makes up for the comic flop sweat that permeates the rest of the film.
It is no secret that elderly millennials can be unpleasant. We are unhip and hostile to anyone not on our wavelength, just look at how Terry/Karla treat Bahlul, or the eccentric old woman who lives in the unit upstairs. Exploring that zeitgeist can be cathartic, like in the shapeshifting sitcom Search Party, which also starred Early. Over its five seasons, the show relied on surreal exaggeration to create a separation between the premise and its true subject, a common enough comic tool, and Stress Positions never once opts for that remove. Sight gags and physical comedy may create a necessary buffer, but in the end that is not enough. Many films make it difficult to suspend our disbelief, and this has the exact opposite problem. Our belief in this premise is total, and so it is difficult to engage with it as entertainment, or narrative storytelling.
One day, maybe pandemic films will land differently. No matter how hard Hammel tries, we are just not there yet.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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