Though Simmons is a renowned artist with a career spanning over four decades, she is best known to moviegoers as the real-life mother of Lena Dunham, a role that she also portrayed in her daughter’s 2010 gem, “Tiny Furniture.” It’s easy to mistake Simmons’ character in the picture—an acclaimed photographer of miniature artwork—as an entirely accurate version of herself. “My Art” has been described by Simmons as her attempt to explore the mind of a sixty-something female artist on her own terms, and while her performance is just as deftly understated as it was in Dunham’s film, it contains different layers of intrigue. Any theory that “My Art” is a direct follow-up to “Tiny Furniture” is refuted by the opening minutes, as Simmons shares her only scene with Dunham, who is cast not as her daughter but her successful former student, Meryl. This striking name choice instantly caused me to recall the most famous of Meryls, Ms. Streep, who starred in Simmons’ 2006 short, “The Music of Regret,” a 40-minute musical that romantically paired the actress with various ventriloquist dummies. Household items inspired by the utopian postwar imagery Simmons observed in her youth were brought to life by costumed dancers, accentuating the innate artifice of the objects themselves.
“My Art” takes this concept a step further by placing Simmons in meticulous recreations of classic Hollywood films. As Ellie, a teacher yearning for recognition in the NYC arts community, Simmons has difficulty voicing her true feelings. There’s an amusing moment where she hands a student back some snacks that he had brought to class, pretending to have enjoyed them and even asking him to e-mail her the recipe. When Ellie agrees to stay at her friend’s summer home and studio in Upstate New York (the same destination Dunham’s heroine ended up on HBO’s “Girls”), she finds that her personal voice is liberated within the art that she creates. Her welcome presence on the property is of immediate interest to Frank (Robert Clohessy), a recently widowed landscaper, and his partner, Tom (Josh Safdie). Neither man has found fulfillment in his work, and Ellie’s experiments with video and back projection prove to be an irresistible distraction, much to the bewilderment of Tom’s wife (hilariously played in two brief scenes by Parker Posey). Having enjoyed his past career in acting, Frank jumps at the opportunity to be in front of the camera with Ellie, even going so far as to show up at the studio unannounced. When he asks Ellie what motivates her to re-stage scenes immortalized by iconic actors, she opens up about her fascination with the impossibility of ordinary people being the people onscreen, even as the camera allows them to temporarily inhabit that same space. Ellie’s video art could be interpreted as a hybrid of Herbert Ross’ “Play it Again, Sam,” in which Woody Allen’s neurotic protagonist found himself uttering the same words as his idol, Bogie, in “Casablanca,” and Allen’s own “Zelig,” the playful comedy where the filmmaker inserted himself into archival footage.