Noah Baumbach (2015)
In Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, the title character was trying to build a life in New York City. In Mistress America, Tracy, a college freshman in New York, feels isolated and contacts Brooke, the daughter of the man whom Tracy’s mother is soon to marry. Brooke has been in New York for some time and knows her way around the place. Frances was played by Greta Gerwig, who now plays Brooke – Gerwig looks to have switched from the role of rookie to that of the mentor who will show neophyte Tracy (Lola Kirke) the New York ropes. That first impression is deceptive. By the end of Mistress America, which covers just a few weeks in the protagonists’ lives, Tracy, who wants to be a writer, has been accepted as a member of the college lit society she was desperate to get into. She feels she’s learned things about life from Brooke and has also quickly put her to good literary use. Brooke, on the other hand, has emerged as a congenital loser in love and in money-making: she’s packing up her life in New York and moving to Los Angeles. Her decision has a back-to-square-one dimension beyond the narrative frame of Mistress America. Frances in the earlier film was a native Californian; so is Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote this film, as she co-wrote Frances Ha, with Noah Baumbach.
Brooke has just turned thirty and Tracy is eighteen. Their ages matter, to Brooke and to viewers of the film. Brooke regularly visits a psychic (Seth Barrish) and Tracy tags along a couple of times. When the psychic refers to Tracy as ‘the young one’, Brooke insists that there’s ‘Only ten, twelve years between us – we’re contemporaries!’ Brooke has a point – and not only in the sense that it’s important to the film’s dynamic that the younger girl is revealed to be the less naive of the two. Brooke’s protest also brings to mind the moment in Frances Ha when the heroine is told that, compared with her friend and actual contemporary Sophie, ‘You seem a lot older but less grown up’. A difficulty I had with Mistress America was in the casting and performance of Lola Kirke. She is actually twenty-four and that’s what she looks; her voice is low-pitched (I often found it hard to make out what she was saying) compared with Greta Gerwig’s. But it’s only these external elements that confuse the relative ages of Tracy and Brooke. (Gerwig was thirty-one when the film was being made.) Lola Kirke doesn’t suggest any kind of inner maturity or express Tracy’s capacity to use people – a capacity totally lacking in her older stepsister-to-be. Kirke’s performance is dull beyond what’s required of a foil to the more comically adventurous Gerwig.
Greta Gerwig makes a great entrance, as Brooke comes down a flight of steps to meet Tracy for the first time, in Times Square. You smile at this first sight of Gerwig’s exuberant awkwardness (and at first hearing of Brooke too, on the other end of Tracy’s phone). She kept me smiling for a good few minutes but Mistress America is excessively dependent on her charm and skill and, although neither is in doubt, Gerwig isn’t showing much here that she hasn’t shown before. I laughed only once: when Brooke gets angry with Tracy for using her as short story material, Tracy says that’s what writers do and asks what Tennessee Williams would have amounted to if he’d not done the same, and Brooke yells, ‘I don’t give a shit – Tennessee Williams isn’t my friend!’ (Tracy’s short story is called ‘Mistress America’, referring to a super-heroine dreamed up by Brooke, not her.) Brooke’s outburst is by far the best moment in an overlong sequence at the spectacular Connecticut home of her former boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus) and Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), his new partner. Mamie-Claire stole, as well as Dylan, Brooke’s two cats and the commercial idea that’s paid for the spectacular house. Brooke has come to ask Dylan for money to start up a restaurant (her subsequent boyfriend has deserted her and this enterprise) and the showdown in Connecticut involves several other people: Tony (Matthew Shear), Tracy’s fellow freshman who also writes fiction and who’s chauffeured her and Brooke to Dylan’s; Tony’s pathologically possessive girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who has just that one characteristic; Karen (Cindy Cheung), a lawyer friend of Mamie-Claire; and a disgruntled neighbour (Dean Wareham). This plays like one of those scenes in the theatre when a writer has contrived to get virtually the whole cast together but isn’t sure what to do next, and has to keep giving everyone the odd line to justify their presence on stage.
As you’d expect, Baumbach and Gerwig have written plenty of smart dialogue and the players are never less than proficient. (I liked the actor – uncredited on the IMDB listing – who plays Brooke’s neighbour Karim, with a graceful deadpan humour.) But Mistress America is thin and has an acrid flavour that reminded me more of Margot at the Wedding than of any of Baumbach’s three intervening films. Exploiting a personal relationship for creative writing purposes is obviously a theme of Margot too; the forthcoming wedding that sets the story running doesn’t happen in Mistress America either. The marriage between Tracy’s mother (Kathryn Erbe) and Brooke’s (unseen) father is just a mechanism to get Brooke and Tracy together – nothing in their interactions conveys a sense of what either one feels about the prospect of a lifelong familial relationship. The tone of Tracy’s final voiceover is elegiac; she suggests that zany, romantic individuals like Brooke are a dying breed. It’s hard to see how Tracy knows this and odd that she’s nostalgic for a type of person she’s experienced only in Brooke but perhaps it’s the (artificial?) narrative voice of Tracy the writer, rather than the voice of Tracy the character, that we’re hearing. The trailer for Mistress America is to be thoroughly recommended. Unfortunately, it contains most of the best bits of a disappointing film.
20 August 2015
