Laggies (2014)

Laggies arrived in 2014 with a modest inventory: a director, Lynn Shelton, working in the loose Seattle register she helped define; a screenwriter, Andrea Seigel; and a premise about a 28-year-old woman who panics at a proposal and hides out in the home of a teenager she met outside a grocery store. Keira Knightley plays Megan with a slack, agreeable bewilderment. The film observes her drift without diagnosing it. That restraint is the whole personality of the picture, and it is also why the cultural ledger here comes up nearly empty.

There is a female interiority at the center, and an intergenerational friendship between Megan and Annika that the film treats as genuine, not as a punchline. That much registers as a mild progressive sensibility, though the movie never argues a thesis about it. The economic texture is thinner still: Megan is described as overeducated and underemployed, a phrase that gestures toward millennial precarity and then wanders off before anyone asks who arranged the arrangement. Seattle's whiteness goes unremarked. Race, queerness, climate, body politics, neurodivergence, history: none of it is on the agenda. The film has no interest in the ledger.

What it has instead is temperament. The scenes ramble, the jokes land softly, and nobody stands up to deliver a lesson. Sam Rockwell's Craig is a tired single father, not a symbol. The ending, in which Megan leaves a box of wine with a check-box note, is charming and unserious. A film can be thoughtful about a woman's stalled life and still decline to instruct us. This one declines, politely, for ninety-nine minutes. In the taxonomy of social consciousness, it is a vintage of almost no discernible body.