Baghead bills itself as being presented by "the Duplass Brothers." That's Jay Duplass, who a few years ago directed The Puffy Chair, from a script he co-wrote with brother Mark, who starred in it and produced it. Along though The Puffy Chair was no major world-changing feat, it had a story and actual jokes and was decently lit, all of which easily set it apart from the work of most of the filmmakers who've been lumped together under the heading "mumblecore"--such as Joe Swanberg, whose Hannah Takes the Stairs featured Mark Duplass as the first, and funniest, of the serial boyfriends of the confused heroine (Greta Gerwig). The Dupplass boys may be having second thoughts about that, because Baghead, on which they share writing and directing credits, opens with a fairly vicious parody of a half-assed "mumblecore"-style independent film that looks as if the print had been delivered to the projection room in a cinnamon roll box with the icing still stuck to the insides. After the in-jokes are out of the way, our heroes--two failed actor-brothers named Matt (Ross Partridge) and Chad (Steve Zissis) and the women in their lives (played by Gerwig and Elise Muller)-- repair to a family house in the woods to work on their fantasy of writing a script for a movie that will launch the four of them out of film-extra work and to see what they can come up with in the way of comedy and drama with the tangle of misfiring sexual and romantic attractions between them. (Chad, who's a bit of a schlub in comparison to his brother--"You got Elvis hair," he tells him reproachfully--is in love with Gerwig, who has does indeed have the hots for Matt, who in turn think that he and Muller have broken up as a couple, even though she still regards him as her "soul mate.")
Baghead runs out of gas about twenty minutes from the finish line, when it resorts to a plot twist reminiscent of the lesser work of Sherwood Schwartz. But up to that point, it's surprisingly funny. Like The Puffy Chair, it's scaled small, and because it's set mostly in the house, it lacks the built-in advantage that The Puffy Chair had just by virtue of its being a road movie: it's easier to forgive the lack of forward momentum when at least the scenery keeps changing. The Dupplass brothers have humor, but they don't (yet) have a farce architect's talent for stoking the tangle of longings and self-delusions they set up until it builds to a comic explosion. They seem content to just polish and turn them over and examine them from different angles. That's an honest approach, and this new movie is likable even after it wears out its own possibilities, but if they plan on being in movies for the long haul, they need to start thinking bigger. The good news is that, unlike some of the directors they've been linked with, I can actually picture them doing that. For now, the biggest surprise in Baghead is Greta Gerwig, who seemed embarrassingly callow, and even not so bright, in the overhyped Hannah Takes the Stairs. Here, she seems callow and not-so-bright, but this time it's deliberate, and she manages to be charming, too. It's actually a good sign for her long-term prospects that she's better at playing a character than she was at Embodying the Emotional Confusion of Her Generation.
[Correction: This piece originally falsely stated that Mark and Jay Duplass, who wrote and directed Baghead, act in it as well. We regret the error.]