The first hour or so of the Williamsburg comedy “Fort Tilden” is an endurance test. Watching aimless hipsters Harper (Bridey Elliott) and Allie (Clare McNulty) snipe at each other and everyone around them is rather like being forced to listen to a loud and inane conversation between two nasty idiots on the bus. By the fifth time the two start whining about how they need coffeeeee soooooo baaaaad (like, OMG), you start hoping writer-directors Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers will do you a solid and have their defiantly unlikable characters hit by a truck. Stat.
Unlikability is a tricky game to master and unpredictable in its effects, so your tolerance/enjoyment of two jerks spewing pettiness and empty superiority may vary. But the film definitely stacks the deck against its protagonists: Allie and Harper are rich, spoiled, mean, useless and pathologically selfish. (Think HBO’s “Girls” on A. Rod’s steroids.) The 26-year-olds’ matching rompers — i.e., onesies for the Urban Outfitters set — tell you pretty much everything about where they are in life.
The near-miracle that 2014 SXSW prize-winner “Fort Tilden” pulls off is eventually making this familiar and easily hateable pair into nuanced, melancholic and disastrously overcompensating individuals worth getting to know.
Journeying to a remote beach in Queens with four pills of molly to split with two guys they met the night before is the only thing Harper and Allie have planned for the day. Allie, the meeker of the two, actually does have something else she should do: meeting with her Peace Corps liaison before her upcoming trip to Liberia, a voyage which she refuses to admit is about as likely as finding a smiling barista in Brooklyn. “Are you going to help people or to look like you’re helping people?” she’s asked by an obnoxious acquaintance. Allie would love to know that herself.
The film unfolds over the course the day, during which the hapless ninnies bike, trek and cab to Fort Tilden. Along the way, they meet New York stereotypes like the overprotective Park Slope mom and the earnest Teach for America fellows in a less-genteel neighborhood, whom the casually vicious Harper badmouths for their “brittle scarecrow hair.” Such encounters are opportunities for feel-bad-for-laughing insult comedy, but one of the most disappointing aspects of Bliss and Rogers’ script is how consistently unfunny it is, despite Elliott and McNulty’s lively and committed performances.
While Allie actively ignores the numerous messages from her Peace Corps liaison, Harper hits up her wealthy father for money while fishing for a dick pic from a guy with an impeccable you-know-what. From their addiction to their phones to the Band-Aid on the back of Harper’s ankle and her strategic use of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” as an aphrodisiac, Bliss and Rogers’ snapshot of insufferable youth is pitch-perfect.
Even before Allie and Harper reach their final destination, they begin to confront the issues they’d hoped to avoid through their studied obliviousness. From there, the film confidently switches gears into a moving character study of how life passes by while you’re busy looking like you don’t care. More interesting than the growing fissures in their friendship are the increasingly ruinous consequences of thoughtlessness as a way of life.
Harper, who had seemed borderline sociopathic in her cruelty, has a particularly heartrending sexual encounter after her neediness gets the best of her. It’s not at all what you’d expect, certainly not from a beautiful female character, but the incident flawlessly and understatedly fleshes out everything we know about this quietly despairing, overgrown mean girl.
Growing up is hard to do, but so is avoiding it entirely, argues “Fort Tilden.” Either way, the struggle is real.