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Too Much, But Not Enough
Lena Dunham’s first Netflix series can’t reconcile her autobiography with expat escapism.
But later in the series, when Jessica experiences heartbreak or flashes back to difficult memories of her previous life in New York, Dunham reverts to a style of direction that’s all her: a long held shot to punctuate a scene with an ellipsis, moments accompanied by softer lighting and harsher truths. Jessica is a New Yorker reeling from a breakup with a snooty boyfriend and moves to London for a marketing job, where she meets a reserved musician named Felix Remen (played by The White Lotus season two’s Will Sharpe, a prolific writer and director better known across the pond for movies like the one where Benedict Cumberbatch painted a lot of cats). All of this is the stuff of classic romantic fantasy in the vein of Curtis, Darren Starr, and even Jane Austen — at one point, Jessica imagines Felix dressed up as Mr. Darcy — but the whipped-cream portions of Too Much arenever as compelling as the glass-shard self-laceration at which Dunham excels.
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