“Well, I guess this is our rape moment.”
“I’m going to have a Xanax, do you want one?”
These lines occur late in Fort Tilden, the debut feature of writer-directors Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers. It’s hardly the first film to indict youthful insouciance, nor will it be the last, and a joke like this one – a rape joke, that is, the supreme icon of callowness – doesn’t bode well out of context. It’s hard to tell if they’re acknowledging a clear and present danger or not; nothing happens, but the resigned, deadpan delivery could go either way. That’s the point: even the possibility of their victimization cannot stir them from blank irony.
Fort Tilden can be powerful in moments like these, showing how the harsh realities of being a young woman coexist with the insulation from the outside world that features in most critiques of the current twenty-something cohort. Just as often, though, it is the movie version of the self-appointed social-critic-in-residence, a participant-observer deciding who’s a hipster and who isn’t: hammy enough to keep getting invited, sometimes even perceptive, but sometimes reductive, too, and ultimately kind of a bummer.
This is a classic microcosm movie. Fort Tilden takes place over the course of a day, as two white Brooklynites head to the titular beach, repeatedly sidetracked by their vapidity and unchecked privilege. In 2015, of course, the more salient term than “hipster” is “millennial,” and the setup is checklist of thinkpiece clichés. Allie (Clare McNulty), the blonde, is setting sail for the Peace Corps and openly dreading it, unable to produce a reason for signing up in the first place beyond a vague pursuit of meaning. Harper (Bridey Elliott), the brunette, is a carefree, cynical flake with a sluggish commitment to painting poorly sponsored by her rich dad. They occupy a superfluously spacious Williamsburg loft, maintain friendships of convenience, and default in idleness to their iPhones. They wear rompers. They whine about the heat. They whine about cab fares. They call 911 on a litter of abandoned kittens. They ponder the novelty of building a “ghetto dollhouse.”
They are, in short, embodiments of our civilization’s dismal future: as one character pithily puts it, “the millennials are so fucked.” But though the characterizations are pretty on-the-nose, they are not mere grotesques. Not entirely, anyway. As the girls’ journey grows progressively more hopeless, submerged tensions rise to the surface of their friendship. Harper excoriates Allie’s lack of follow-through, while Allie suspects Harper avoids challenges completely out of fear of failure. Both are cast as symptoms of generational malaise. Harper finds some dreary emancipation in divesting from any expectations for herself. Allie persists in holding herself to a higher standard, and encounters only frustration.
All of this starts out as breezy and broad, and to be sure, Fort Tilden has a handful of genuinely funny moments. Harper’s withering commentary keeps the film on its feet even when it slogs; she meets her match in her dandyish fuck-buddy Benji (Peter Vack), and for a brief instant, Fort Tilden crackles. A shot of Harper and Allie frantically decoding the bike route through a bustling intersection, too, is perfectly timed and staged, and will no doubt resonate with any urban bike commuter. But just as frequently, scenes struggle to find a comic rhythm. Bad framing and cluttered blocking completely sabotage an irate neighbor’s comic rant in the opening scene, and a gag concerning Allie’s collision with a baby carriage later on.
The film finds its footing once it surrenders to its bleak undercurrent. It is one thing to find humor in Harper and Allie’s casual indifference to history and the plight of others. It is another to observe, only remotely more soberly, as they accept their well-insulated fecklessness as destiny. The lead actresses, both relative newcomers, perform a balancing act that seasoned performers would likely still find difficult, of imbuing fatuous characters with persuasive humanity. McNulty brings a wounded petulance to Allie, the film’s emotional center, and Elliott is repellently caustic as Harper, even as she gets the lion’s share of laughs.
This is also a credit to Bliss and Rogers, who avoid sentimentality like the plague. Their most admirable feat is nuancing their protagonists’ sense of entitlement with a keen eye to what they endure as women. Harper’s vivid pronouncements about her genitals might be a caricature of sexual empowerment, but the open misogyny of Benji complaining to his gay sycophants that bug spray “literally smells like a cunt” makes it clear what she’s up against. In a striking later sequence, they respond to the suspicion that they’re being followed with stories of sexual harassment that are hilarious in their extremity, and heartbreaking in their plausibility.
By its feel-bad end, Fort Tilden has entered the pantheon of participant-observer satire alongside Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For the Money and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction. The mercilessness is somewhat myopic. There is plenty to take millennials to task for, not least of all their technologized detachment, visualized brilliantly here as text bubble footnotes. But by casting the lot as entirely culturally, politically, and morally vacuous, the film avoids inconvenient truths. That sometimes young people drink PBR because it’s cheap and they’re poor. That some of them are black and not completely reduced to serving ‘real talk’ from the sidelines. Or that some of their convictions are perfectly sincere, even if misdirected into hashtag activism. Fort Tilden comes close to confronting these contradictions, but is never more insightful or funny than a single half-hour of Broad City.