Family Tree (2009)

[StevePulaski]

Family Tree (2009)
Directed by: Kentucker Audley

Rating: ★★★

Kentucker Audley's short film "Family Tree," another short by Audley that I consider a slice of his personal life and little more, contains a fantastic scene where the short's characters, played by people like the inimitable Greta Gerwig, Girls' Lena Dunham, and Catfish's Ariel Schulman, engage in a brief but hilarious dance session to the remix of rapper Unk's song "Walk it Out." The scene is everything mumblecore, as a genre and as an independent subsector (not movement) hasn't been about, and the irony of the brief little scene is pretty hilarious.

"Family Tree" concerns Timothy Morton and Lena Dunham, siblings whom we can see fight and passively bicker over different approaches to life. Tim would rather be humble and quiet in the face of people he doesn't know, where Lena would rather him be more inviting and sociable. After Lena invites a barrage of her wacky, twentysomething friends over, much to Tim's dismay, seeing as he cannot complete any work now, she is frustrated to see him cold and uninviting in the presence of company. This allows the last six minutes of a ten minute short to take place on an air mattress, where the siblings confront their social differences.

"Family Tree" is another "unrelated epilogue" to Audley's full-length film Team Picture, which I suppose I should get to watching now. The film's other "unrelated epilogue" "Ginger Sand" was criticized by me for having no real purpose or defining conversation other than to offer a glimpse at what Audley's personal life often entails. "Family Tree" has a more significant conversation at its core, and one funny scene, which makes it instantly better than "Ginger Sand." Still, I feel if one of these "epilogues" could've been fleshed out into their own film, or a short maybe twice or thrice as long, we could've had a better, more contemplative picture and more than a three paragraph review on our hands.

Starring: Timothy Morton, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Ana Kayne, Ariel Schulman, and Woodrow Morton. Directed by: Kentucker Audley.