It’s safe to say that Noah Baumbach’s work can now be divided into two periods: BG (Before Greta) and AG (After Greta).
The Greta in this case is Greta Gerwig, his leading lady, his girlfriend, his sometimes writing partner, and his muse. BG, Baumbach made films—some great!—with a variety of leading ladies: Laura Linney, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh. AG, he almost exclusively makes movies starring Greta Gerwig and, what’s more, about Greta Gerwig, and her own quirky brand of off-kilter, gamine-meets-giraffe charm. (In fairness, earlier this year, he made the excellent While We’re Young which was notably Gerwig-free.)
Let me make something clear. I don’t dislike Greta Gerwig. She’s a fine actress, certainly more talented and appealing than many other actresses who are far more famous. What I don’t like is the way Baumbach literally can’t stop mythologizing her. (And, apparently, she can’t stop mythologizing herself—she co-wrote both Frances Ha and Mistress America.)
In some sense, the Gerwig in Baumbach’s films is a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She’s a life force, a jumble of creative impulses, an adorable mess—and her chaotic way of jumping into things, willy-nilly, with youthful optimism and unshakable pluck, is just part of her allure. But the MPDG trope is particularly insidious because it’s not usually about the “girl” at all, but the effect she has on our hero, a sad sack man—generally teaching him to embrace life, gaze at the stars, dance in the streets, etc. That’s not the case here. Yes, in their first collaboration—Greenberg—there was a man (Ben Stiller), less a sad-sack than a caustic asshole, and even Gerwig’s naïve, corn-fed sweetness couldn’t save him. But since then, there has been no male love interest at all. (Although I suppose one could make the case that the sad sack man being saved by Gerwig is Baumbach himself.)
Frances Ha was ostensibly about the difficulty of finding work, love, and creative fulfillment in New York city, but more than anything else, it was a meditation on the adorableness of Gerwig. Their latest collaboration, Mistress America, also set in New York, is about Gerwig’s magnetic effect on—wait for it— a sad-sack girl. Happily, there’s more here than meets the eye.
Tracy (promising newcomer Lola Kirke) is a freshman at Barnard and having a hard time finding her groove. She applies to the exclusive (and pretentious—they carry briefcases around campus) literary society but doesn’t get in, and her only real friend is a fellow rejectee named Tony (Matthew Shear, who looks sort of like Andy Samberg, if he’d gained the freshman 15). Sitting on her bed, they read each other’s rejected manuscripts. “Do you want my notes now?” Tony says when they’re done. The prospect of Tony being a boyfriend (and not just a boy friend) is dashed when she stumbles upon him in the quad holding hands with another girl (Jasmine Cephas Jones). Despondent, she decides to take her mother’s advice and look up Manhattan resident Brooke (Gerwig), who is soon to be her new step-sister.
Brooke gets a comic entrance, descending a flight of stars in Times Square where she lives, very aware of the fabulousness of it all, but not expecting it to be so difficult to maintain eye contact all the way down. Tracy, however, is enchanted (natch). They spend the night together—going to a bar, then to a club, where Brooke goes on stage and dances with the band and later kisses the bass player, and then back to Brooke’s fabulous loft apartment. All the while, Brooke is going on about her philosophy of life (try new things!), her big plans (to open a cozy restaurant/hair salon called Mom’s), her boyfriend (who’s, suspiciously, in Greece), her assortment of jobs (interior decorator, writer, tee-shirt designer). She’s also prone to wild verbal mood swings. “I love froyo!…I watched my mother die,” she says, without skipping a beat. Tracy knows she’s full of shit, but she doesn’t care. She goes back to her dorm and, in a burst of Brooke-powered inspiration, writes a new short story—all about Brooke.
“She lived exactly how a young woman should live,” she writes.
Anyway. All of this was pretty much exactly what I expected Mistress America to be like, except I really enjoyed the stuff at Barnard, particularly Tracy’s interactions with the strangely passive Tony (who has a car but is morbidly afraid of driving outside of New York City) and his paranoid jealous girlfriend.
And then, Mistress America, gets kind of good. It’s now, officially, the second film of the year that is saved by a road trip and a detour—Paper Towns being the other one. What happens is, Brooke is told by a fortune teller that she must confront her old roomie-turned-nemesis Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), who, according to Brooke at least, stole her genius tee-shirt design idea, then stole her fiancée Dylan, then stole her cats. So they all load into Tony’s car—he bravely leaves the city—and drive out to Connecticut to confront the pompous Mamie-Claire and ask her and Dylan to invest in Mom’s, because they owe her.
From there, the film turns into a kind of madcap comedy—with people coming and going in Mamie-Claire’s impeccable home— including a pissed off neighbor, a friend of Mamie-Claire’s who can’t seem to leave, and finally Dylan (Michael Chernus), who is not exactly the dashing lothario one might expect—and various secrets and lies are unearthed. Baumbach is able to turn his loving gaze away from Gerwig long enough to let his actors shine and allow us to enjoy all the mayhem.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a screwball indie film—and my screening audience was seriously delighted. Here’s the thing: Both Baumbach and Gerwig are talented. The silly but smart second half of Mistress America shows what they can do together if they can just turn the camera, even briefly, away from Gerwig, herself.