Two years ago, I placed my money on Lynn Shelton to lead the charge of brining the mumblecore movement to the mainstream. After seeing “Laggies,” however, I may want to switch my bet to Joe Swanberg.
That is not to imply Shelton’s latest feature indicates a decline in the quality of her output; “Laggies” is certainly a recovery since she sputtered last year with the deservedly little-seen “Touchy Feely.” Moreover, it is probably her most accessible (or marketable) film to date. But in order to achieve that, Shelton has not adapted or modified the movement from which she arose. She has essentially dispersed of it all together.
The only part of “Laggies” that remains in the mumblecore tradition is its protagonist, Keira Knightley’s Megan. She’s a spiritual cousin of Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha and Lena Dunham’s Aura from “Tiny Furniture,” a confused and commitment-phobic upper-middle-class millennial twentysomething ambling haplessly through the best years of her life. She clearly does not love her boyfriend (Mark Webber, yet she lacks the decisiveness to reject his advances towards marriage. She invested in post-graduate education, but she prefers the lack of responsibility that comes from sign-twirling for her father (Jeff Garlin).
Knightley nails the generational milieu of indirection and indecision, so it is too bad that the rest of “Laggies” could not be nearly as interesting as her. Shelton, working from a screenplay by Andrea Seigel, steers the film quickly into the realm of standard-issue chick flicks and rom-coms. Once she lays the cards on the table, it becomes pretty clear where the film will go – although I did hold out hope that there might be a subversive or original twist to spruce things up a bit.
Joe Swanberg had a modest little hit on his hands last summer with “
Marshall and the Movies 
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