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    Review: ‘Too Much’ Is Not Nervy Enough

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    This new Netflix comedy by Lena Dunham is the surprisingly mild tale of a young woman fleeing New York after a catastrophic breakup.In a scene from the new Netflix comedy “Too Much,” Jessica (Megan Stalter), a frustrated line producer, vents to her colleagues about her resentments. A co-worker snips: “You’re realizing that middling white women feel terrible wherever they go.” Well, with frenemies like this …Created by Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber, a British musician, “Too Much” follows our heroine Jessica as she flees New York after a catastrophic breakup. She moves to London for the romance of it all — the Jane Austen, the Bridget Jones, the BritBox. The distance from her grandmother (Rhea Perlman), mother (Rita Wilson) and sister (Dunham) is a perk, too, though oceans and time zones are no match for matriarchs who want to impart wisdom on vaginal health.Jessica is a pajama girlie, seen often in granny nighties, frilly tap shorts and teddies. By day, she wears baby-doll dresses and voluminous sailor-neck shifts, big bows in her hair, space buns and a pale blue manicure. She puts her gremlin dog in sweaters and gowns, and she stomps her feet when she’s angry.She also can’t stop looking at her ex’s new girlfriend’s social media. How can the knitting influencer and lizard rescuer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski) be so happy with Zev (Michael Zegen), when she, Jessica, was supposed to be celebrating her seventh anniversary with him at this very moment? Jessica scrolls obsessively, and she records her own private video diaries addressed to Wendy, videos that bubble with post-breakup rage and confusion.But maybe all that insecurity and despair is more of the New York Jessica, because the London Jessica meets a brooding singer-songwriter, Felix (Will Sharpe), on her very first night in town. They hit it off immediately and speed-run the traditional relationship markers: the I-love-yous, the dinner with the boss, the awkward introduction to friends, the strained plus-one-at-the-wedding mishegoss, the disclosure of family baggage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made Lena Dunham’s Rom-Com Just Right

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      When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.“Too Much,” with Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter, was inspired by Lena Dunham’s own story of meeting her husband, Luis Felber.NetflixIs “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Let’s Call Her Patty’ Review: Rhea Perlman as an Uptown Matriarch

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      Rhea Perlman stars as a quintessential Upper West Sider in Zarina Shea’s snapshot of affluent, self-flagellating motherhoodShe shops at Zabar’s, does Pilates on Columbus Avenue and resides comfortably in a prewar high rise between West End and Riverside, where she gossips about private lives as though they were front-page news.That she could be any number of women, of some advanced years and moderate means, who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is suggested by the taxonomic title “Let’s Call Her Patty,” a new play by Zarina Shea that opened on Tuesday night at the Claire Tow Theater, overlooking its subject’s natural habitat.Close your eyes to picture the type, and the production’s star, Rhea Perlman, may spring directly from a sidewalk crack, with her featherweight frame, babka-colored curls and voice like gravel and honey.Patty is introduced to the audience, chopping onions behind a long and luxe marble-topped kitchen island, by her niece Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer). Scene-setting banter between the two demonstrates their shorthand intimacy, and Patty’s reflexive tendency to make other people’s business her own (and, more specifically, about her). That notably includes the triumphs but mostly troubles of Patty’s daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman), an artist who struggles with body image and addiction.Patty’s maternal relationships with Cecile and Sammy are the play’s sources of conflict (Patty’s offstage husband, Hal, we’re told, is “fine”). When Cecile, who appears onstage only in brief interludes, falls out of touch, Patty considers it personal punishment, simultaneously convinced that she’s to blame for her daughter’s problems and defensive at her own accusation. Sammy, a font of patience as she is of exposition, gently suggests, “I think this is not about you.”Of course, she’s right. Patty is presented as a quintessential Jewish mother, but the qualities she exemplifies are not culturally exclusive; anyone who recognizes her narcissism from their family dynamics might appreciate a trigger warning. And yet, the play’s own narrow focus on Patty works to its detriment.The matriarch is little more than an amalgam of stereotypes; that there is truth to them is hardly a revelation. But the play does little to question or disrupt the preconceived notions it assumes New York audiences will have about “an Upper West Side lady” like Patty. Nor does Perlman mine much unseen depth from a character exclusively defined by circumstance.The production, from the director Margot Bordelon, confines Patty behind her cutting board, where she chops imaginary onions without shedding a tear for much of the play’s brief 70 minutes. If this is a character study, Patty’s pungent, messy center is largely withheld from view.Goldman’s Cecile occasionally drags a folding chair onstage to insert herself into her mother’s narrative, trembling like a frazzled live wire. Unfortunately, Cecile is kept at arm’s length from a story in which she seems to have the most compelling inner life. Sammy is likewise sketched mostly in relation to her aunt; that Sammy’s mother-in-law is near death is relevant only insofar as it keeps her from being with Patty.Patty’s co-op apartment, one of her primary distinguishing features, is suggested with chic austerity by Kristen Robinson’s set, reflecting a fixation on wealth that the play seems unsure whether it means to critique. Pivots in focus and time are punctuated with abrupt shifts in lighting (by Oliver Wason) and sound (Sinan Refik Zafar) that drum up tension and surprise the drama otherwise lacks.“Let’s Call Her Patty” gestures toward an oral tradition of storytelling that aims to preserve local, and often endangered, histories. Sammy’s narration acknowledges the Lenape tribe, who once lived on the land now occupied by New York City, and suggests that one day it will all be underwater. Dutifully recording for posterity the era of the affluent and self-flagellating mother seems to be as much an act of ambivalence as of love.Let’s Call Her PattyThrough Aug. 27 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Marvelous and the Black Hole’ Review: Finding Magic Amid Rage

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      A teenager reeling from the loss of her mother discovers an unlikely companion in an older magician.Sammy Ko (Miya Cech), the protagonist of this dark coming-of-age comedy, ticks all the boxes of adolescent angst. She smokes and acts out at school; secretly gives herself tattoos with a rudimentary rig in her bedroom; and lashes out at her father, Angus (Leonardo Nam), for dating so soon after the death of her mother.When Angus reaches his wit’s end with Sammy, he gives her an ultimatum: commit to a community-college class or go to a camp for troubled kids. During a smoke break in the college bathroom, Sammy meets Margot (Rhea Perlman), a whimsical magician who turns Sammy into her reluctant apprentice.That’s the setup for “Marvelous and the Black Hole,” the writer-director Kate Tsang’s debut feature, which combines folklore, sketch art and sleight-of-hand magic to explore grief, family ties and how to channel rage.Cech is believable as a troubled teenager, and it’s refreshing to see an Asian American girl as a protagonist, but the film has a limited emotional range, jumping among several plot elements without fully fleshing them out. Missing are scenes that show how this death affected Sammy’s relationship with her sister, Patricia, or what the family’s dynamic was before the tragedy. The film focuses instead on Sammy’s all-consuming rage and self-destruction, making it feel one-note, with too few moments of redemption or connection.Marvelous and the Black HoleNot rated. Running time 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More