“I get off in 20 minutes.”
If I were a father, for an actual human being and not just some lousy house plant, I’d constantly be worried about two things, especially if my kid was a girl: that she’d run away and that she’d end up reminiscent of Chloë Sevigny’s character in “Looking for Liz/Lilly Changes.”
Like Parker Posey’s Liz, who so memorably shook up Louie’s life in “Daddy’s Girlfriend,” Sevigny played a Brooklyn book clerk who probably listens to ukulele tribute albums; in fact, she took Liz’s job. But unlike Liz, her character felt underwritten. The concept — a manic pixie-like obsessive who gets off to other people’s romances, in every sense of the phrasing, but not her own, despite (or because of) the fact that’s she married — was there, but that’s all she was: an idea. Or, more to the point, just a cuckoo crazy nutjob (though I did like how Louie captured the idea of falling for someone, and then meeting someone similar to your infatuation, but not feeling the same way about them). I don’t think Sevigny played her wrong; there just wasn’t much to play with, except for, well, herself. Which is a shame because the second half of the episode, “Lilly Changes,” was fantastic, full of season-defining moments, like Jane yelling in Slovenian and Louie flipping his kids off, smoking and using his laptop while on the toilet, and tipping the cop, to say nothing of the cab bit during the credits.
Despite my mixed feelings on the first half of the episode, there were a TON of soul-crushing moments in “Looking for Liz/Lilly Changes,” so in lieu of any bullet points, which would all be about how amazing Jane and Lilly are anyways, let’s go straight to the pretty pictures. Maybe we can get some ice cream after.
