Adult Life Skills

Adult Life Skills

A superficial glance at the main character of “Adult Life Skills,” Rachel Tunnard’s feature debut, might lead one to believe Anna is a millennial stereotype. She’s self-absorbed, holds a dead-end job with no ambition and little romance in her life. The saving grace that saves Anna from becoming an eye-rolling representation of a generation is that she doesn’t live in her mother’s basement she lives in a shed in her mom’s backyard.

Expanding on Tunnard’s 2014 short “Emotional Fusebox,” “Adult Life Skills” gives Jodie Whittaker who played the same character in both projects more chances to act out and act silly. For all its faults, the film works when it humanizes Anna through Whittaker’s performance rather than the story.

For most of the film, “Adult Life Skills” hides half of its backstory from viewers as if it can. Something happened to Anna that affected her deeply, but even the other characters talk around what happened until much later in the movie. The film sets up a guessing game with its eccentric lead who makes home movies with her thumbs as characters: Are we supposed to laugh at or cry with Anna?

The people in Anna’s life want her to grow up and move out of her shed an actual shell where she hoards nostalgia for better days. Around Anna’s 30th birthday, Marion (Lorraine Ashbourne), her mother starts pushing her to find a flat and move out. Then Fiona (Rachael Deering), an old schoolmate comes back to their small English town for a visit in another attempt at pulling Anna out of this rut shaped like her shed.

Throughout most of the movie, Brendan (Brett Goldstein), an awkward realtor incapable of reading social situations flirts with Anna only for her to swat him away; Alice (Alice Lowe), Anna’s co-worker at a campground, assigns her to watch over Clint (Ozzy Myers), a fussy boy who wears cowboy duds and won’t let anyone rest. He’s kind of like her a little menace and the two become unlikely kindred spirits in their loneliness.

These are the moments where Whittaker gets to stretch. Anna’s face bears a semi-permanent state of exhaustion and disbelief that her life is somehow still happening. Her clothes always look rumpled, and she hasn’t seen a comb for days. No matter what the weather looks like outside, it’s always overcast where they are, and the ground is never dry. The light behind her looks gloomy, much like how she feels on the inside most days. She’s not suffering from millennial ennui but more likely depression. But the movie wants so badly to be lighthearted that it skirts around this part of Anna.

Whittaker strikes a balance between tragic and comic with all these scenarios for her character. She can hold a serious conversation with some mysterious guy dressed in scuba gear; cry out when she finally can’t take any more; have an honest talk with this kid who keeps barging into her space; fight with this dissatisfied mom; reenact existential conversations using only her thumbs as characters. There are some bumps on the way to get there, but it feels nice finally getting to meet this person.

This type of unexpected performance by Whittaker is nothing new. In “Venus,” her first movie, she played a young woman who was both mean-spirited and fragile opposite Peter O’Toole. She’s currently acting as the Doctor on the BBC sci-fi show that has been running for years, where she’s given depth to the beloved character that none of the previous 12 (or so) people in that role managed to do. It’s thanks to her that “Adult Life Skills” is even watchable; otherwise, it would be all quirky music playing in reverse and Michel Gondry like segues. She grew up, I just wish this movie did too.

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