Mistress America
Director: Noah
Baumbach
Writers: Noah
Baumbach, Greta Gerwig
Starring: Greta
Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Seth Barrish
Rating: Three and a half stars
out of five
Available in
limited release now.
Greta Gerwig has
displayed, across two collaborations with director Noah Baumbach, the
rare ability to simultaneously be the voice of a generation and also
one of its primary skewers. That's a nearly impossible balancing act,
but after playing the title character in Frances Ha (2013) and
now Brooke in Mistress America, Gerwig has shown she fully
understands her generation's anxieties and aspirations, but she has
enough of a remove from them to take a satirical bite out of them.
As Brooke, Gerwig
plays a 30-year-old self-proclaimed autodidact who can't stop
dreaming about the great things she will do in her life long enough
to follow through on them. She recognizes this, and she is so
self-conscious to avoid projecting her in-progress failures. But of
course, she can't help but project them. She keeps up her performance
as a bubbly, million-ideas-a-second, worldly multi-hyphenate who is
addicted to working in order to figure out what she's “selling”
in life. In reality, she probably needs her multiple jobs to keep
from being on the streets and she doesn't have much to offer in the
way of tangible productivity. But you'll never catch her letting on
to that fact, as she is too busy tweeting her life's grand narrative
or pitching potential investors on the restaurant/community
center/store/barbershop she wants to build. But it is a performance,
and it marks the film's overarching theme.
For all that
two-paragraph hullabaloo about latching onto a generation, Brooke is
not Mistress America's lead character. Instead, her
step-sister-to-be, Tracy (Lola Kirke), is the film's point of view.
She's a college freshman at an all-female New York college and things
aren't going so well for her. She's lonely, a writer trying to break
into the school's literary society, admiring the briefcases they
carry and general “writerly” affect. She's not assertive enough
to make things happen for herself, so she quietly watches (and
judges) her classmates make what she feels to be inane statements
about literature. She's paralyzed, doing nothing.
Tracy's mom
recommends that she give Brooke a call to get acquainted before they
become step-sisters during Thanksgiving break. That is when the
veteran performance giver takes the shy 18-year-old under her wing,
bestowing learned wisdom – and plenty of short story material –
to Tracy.
Soon Tracy begins
putting on different personality hats herself. She gets a bit of a
snarl, developing something of a me-first, “climbing the ladder of
success” attitude. Much like her sort-of sister, she finds herself
pulling away from, or self-sabotaging, the few relationships she has
been able to cultivate in her short time away at school. But the
thing is, she is no closer to achieving her goals than Brooke, always
cultivating material, amassing “short stories” that are more
reports of the things Brooke says than developing characters and
situations for dramatic purposes. She's playing a writer.
The same goes for
the movie's coterie of side characters. Like Brooke and Tracy,
everyone in Mistress America is trying desperately to send an
idealized version of themselves out into the world, but nobody ever
succeeds for any meaningful length of time. Tracy's friends, a couple
of fellow writers who can't stop fighting because of the threat of
infidelity, can never articulate why they are so special. Brooke's
former best friends, at whose suburban Connecticut house of luxury
the movie's climax takes place, have these nouveau riche ambitions
about self improvement and helping the world, but they're selfish (in
silly ways).
Much of the film's
comedy stems from the fact that everyone calls each other out for the
phoniness of their performances. The harsh satire of it is that they
don't really change their behavior – they either accept the
artificial package for the fleeting moments of real connection or
they fade back to their delusions.
With
all that excellence, it's a little disappointing to see it be a film.
Because it's not the most cinematic of stories. There is a lot of
internal subtlety that could perhaps be fleshed out better in novel
form – the running time is less than 90 minutes. The performances,
particularly in the farcical climactic sequence, are so perfectly
suited to a theatrical setting of bouncing and building off each
other that it's enough to make you wish Baumbach wouldn't cut to
different angles. To be fair, there are some moments of comedy that
derive from the cinematic medium, with still shots taking in
excellent reactions and instances of juxtaposition that earn laughs,
but it struggles to justify itself as a movie.
It does not
struggle as a piece of storytelling, though. It culminates in a
speech by Gerwig that seems destined to become a new staple of high
school and college theatre audition monologues – it's all about the
guilt-shame cycle of looking at screens to avoid doing something with
one's life, then feeling guilty about procrastinating. It's all a
little silly and sad, and the smirks help make it easier to take.
Even if it never quite asserts itself as essential cinema, it's near
essential as a piece of generational satire.
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