Fresh off his generational comedy, “While We’re Young,” Noah Baumbach reteams with Greta Gerwig
for “Mistress America,” a story with similar preoccupations about the allure of
youthfulness and struggle for authenticity, but delivered with a delightfully
screwball edge. This is Baumbach’s third
collaboration with Gerwig, following 2010’s
“Greenberg” and 2012’s “Frances Ha,” and her contributions seem to bring out a
looser, more playful side to the director — “Mistress America” plays as a
comfortable companion to “While We’re Young” but without that film’s somewhat
bitter aftertaste.
Throughout
his career, Baumbach has maintained a fascination
with characters who face major life transitions kicking and screaming
(literally the name of his first movie), and in most of his films it is college
that acts as the harsh dividing line between the carefree days of youth and the
crushing responsibilities of adulthood. Tracy (Lola Kirke) has just moved to
New York City as a freshman at Barnard College, and is feeling adrift in the
mystifying social world of higher education. She develops a crush on the first
boy she meets, Tony (Matthew Shear), but that tapers off into a friendship as
they bond over their mutual rejection from the campus’s pretentious literary
society. Tracy’s mother is set to remarry over the Thanksgiving holiday, and
still feeling lonely, Tracy takes her mother’s suggestion to call up her stepsister-to-be,
Brooke (Gerwig).
A whirlwind
of relentless enthusiasm, Brooke is a force of nature. A self-described
autodidact, Brooke is constantly reinventing herself, fashioning herself into a
restaurateur, interior decorator, spinning instructor, and math tutor. Tracy is
dazzled by the older and seemingly wiser Brooke, who seems open to all that the
city has to offer in a way that Tracy wishes for herself.
Gradually it
becomes apparent that while Brooke is an endless source of ideas, she’s mostly
all talk (her latest brainstorm involves a restaurant that’s also a hair
salon); consciously or not, Brooke sees in Tracy a way to perpetuate the
mythology she’s built for herself. Realizing that Brooke isn’t as together as
she seems, Tracy decides to stay along for the ride, but mines the experience
for writing material. As she gets a crash-course in city living, she
surreptitiously scribbles it all down in her notebook, using Brooke as
inspiration for a story she calls “Mistress America” (taken from the title for Brooke’s
proposed superhero television series).
The film’s
screwball tone keeps escalating, finally tipping over into full blown farce as
Brooke and Tracy, along with a few fellow students, pile into a car to invade
the Connecticut home of Brooke’s “ex-friend and nemesis” (a hilariously haughty
Heather Lind) in order to secure startup money. This sequence, with characters
running from room to room, talking over one another, and piling on complication
after complication, is a marvel of writing, performance, timing, and blocking.
The fast-paced banter would give Howard Hawks a run for his money.
“While We’re
Young” showed us what happened when a 40-something couple, played by Ben
Stiller and Naomi Watts, fell under the sway of a younger, “cooler” couple, and
now “Mistress America” gives us that story’s flipside. Like “Paper Towns”
earlier this summer, the film explores the consequences of projecting our own
idealized preconceptions onto someone else. It understands that in a world
where everyone seems to borrow from everyone else, the search for authenticity
can be a fruitless undertaking when no one seems to be quite sure what that is
anymore.
Even when
they’re making bad choices, Gerwig’s script maintains
an affection for its characters that “While We’re Young” didn’t always extend
to its malevolent millennials. Kirke is wonderful in the type of grounded
performance that’s exactly what the film requires as it spirals increasingly
out of control; her Tracy is the perfect straight-woman to Brooke’s manic, dominating
personality. Crucially, she earns our sympathies in those opening scenes when
she’s feeling lost and unsure, convinced that everyone around her somehow knows
precisely what they’re doing. Greta Gerwig is great
as always and despite Brooke’s blatant narcissism, we can see immediately why
people so easily fall under her charm. Brooke is just another in a line of
brilliant comedic creations from Gerwig, providing
further evidence that she’s not just a great writer, but one of the best
leading ladies we have.
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2015.
