Mistress America
Directed by Noah Baumbach,
Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke
Noah Baumbach films are usually both comic and genuinely painful. In Mistress America, he changes the balance and though the film is still touched with poignancy, he fully embraces all the elements of screwball farce and general zaniness.
The film’s achievement rests primarily with the strikingly gifted Greta Gerwig, (the third film of Baumbach’s she has starred in (“Francis Ha” and “Greenberg,” being the others), and the second that the couple have co-written. Gerwig seamlessly embodies her character Brooke, a 30-year-old woman who is long-limbed and slightly awkward, filled with tics like touching and tossing her long blonde hair, manic, hysterical, ditzy, and genuinely witty.
Brooke’s mind mercurially and comically shifts from one subject to another –from her sorrow over her mother’s death to frozen yogurt. She also breathlessly whirls about the cosmos or, in this case, New York City, without a moment of physical or psychological repose. (This could be felt as exhausting and excessive, but Baumbach and Gerwig know just when to stop.)
Brooke, at least in her own mind, is the ultimate chic, sophisticated young Manhattanite. Meeting her younger stepsister-to-be Tracy, who is intense, uneasy, lonely (she has trouble fitting in) a first year Barnard student and aspiring writer (a strong, complementary performance by Lola Kirke) — Brooke presents herself to Tracy as a dynamic, stylish, liberated woman. The kind of woman who lives in a handsome industrial loft around Times Square and juggles freelance jobs as an aerobics instructor, interior decorator (she decorated the waiting room of an East Village laser hair removal center), social media expert, and tops it off with plans to open an eatery in Williamsburg (of course!) that’s nothing less than the definitive, hip lifestyle hangout (“It’s a restaurant, but also where you cut hair.”). Tracy seemingly succumbs to her charm and bubbly life force, and instantly becomes her admirer and protégé.
Brooke may be passionately alive, and verbally sharp, but one feels that like the Carol Lombard character in the ‘30s screwball comedy. “My Man Godfrey,” she is not just a captivating eccentric but a bit of a lunatic. And Tracy’s take on her turns out to be more knowing than mere adulation. After the first night she begins to work on a short story about Brooke. The story raises, in a much more understated fashion, questions that Baumbach invoked in his last film, “While We’re Young,” about the nature of artistic license.
Tracy’s story turns into a narrative device in voice over, and she is a keen and critical observer of Brooke, who in her words “did everything and nothing.” She clearly sees her flaws — Brooke’s egocentricity and fantasizing — but remains beguiled by and needy of her — Brooke’s constant high being an antidote to her own seriousness.
The film concludes with a lengthy comic centerpiece with Brooke, Tracy and two of Tracy’s fellow students — a high-strung, fellow writer, who Tracy has an unrequited crush on (Matthew Shear) and his overly-possessive girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas-Jones) — setting out by car for Connecticut. The trip is Brooke’s desperate attempt to secure an investment from her rich and brittle nemesis Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind) for her teetering restaurant.
The sequence takes place in Mamie-Claire’s coldly modernist mansion with characters’ comings and goings timed beautifully, including a Chinese woman who is part of a pregnant women’s reading group that is discussing Faulkner and a biography of Derrida for escape. There are also two stolen cats, a hefty and sweet ex-lover of Brooke’s, who is Marie-Claire’s husband and a possible restaurant investor, and an angry neighbor is also thrown into the mix. It’s choreographed flawlessly with Brooke at the center, trying to sell her restaurant idea in a foolishly faltering manner. At this moment, one can feel how little substance there is to Brooke’s persona — she even deceives herself about the extent of her self-knowledge — and how fragile she is underneath. But the film never allows pathos to dominate — comic buoyancy is Baumbach’s aim.
Gerwig’s performance is dazzling, for even when she is at her most endearing, she can abruptly become snappish and arrogant. Brooke is never reduced to a single note, for she offers a whole variety of emotions. The film reminds one of Woody Allen at his best — profoundly urban and urbane with Gerwig playing an even more quick-witted variation of Diane Keaton. I’m not saying Baumbach’s film is as good as Manhattan or Annie Hall, but it comes close.
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Mistress America opens at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, Mass., on Sept. 4. For showtimes and tickets, click here.
