Review

Mercurial Mistress

Baumbach puts sharp, enchanting spin on screwball comedy

Brooke (Greta Gerwig) and Tracy (Lola Kirke) pinball around Manhattan like the bright and shiny things they are in Mistress America, Noah Baumbach’s 21st-century screwball comedy.
Brooke (Greta Gerwig) and Tracy (Lola Kirke) pinball around Manhattan like the bright and shiny things they are in Mistress America, Noah Baumbach’s 21st-century screwball comedy.

There are quite a few things to like about Mistress America, this week's Noah Baumbach movie. It's breezy, zipping by in a Billy Wilder-like 84 minutes. It introduces us to the splendid Lola Kirke, who, while well into her 20s, is very convincing as a clever 18-year-old college freshman who falls under the spell of Ditz Goddess Brooke (Greta Gerwig). And finally, it has some very funny lines, some of which sound like smart things actual smart people might say.

And that's plenty to ask of a late-summer movie, one that invites a little urban escapism. It is fun to kick around New York and Greenwich, Conn., with our surrogate Tracy and her Jay Gatsby/Neal Cassady figure Brooke. We can marvel at how much fun it might be to be in her orbit. Brooke might have been what Kerouac was talking about when he spoke of those "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." Jack would have loved Brooke -- I suspect 84 minutes with her might be just about right.

Mistress America

88 Cast: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Matthew Shear, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Heather Lind, Michael Chernus, Cindy Cheung, Dean Wareham

Director: Noah Baumbach

Rating: R, for language including some sexual references

Running time: 84 minutes

Brooke is, like her sorority sister Frances Ha (from Baumbach's 2012 film of the same name), a charming girl with no discernible talent but for living a sort of bohemian-hipster dream. (I recall reading a Lester Bangs essay about how to live like a millionaire on $10 a day; Brooke could give him lessons.) And we experience her through the lens of pretty but socially clumsy Tracy, who has come to Manhattan for college and found the whole experience rather like attending a party where she doesn't know anyone. She does make common cause with fellow student and aspiring writer Tony (Matthew Shear) with whom she bonds after they both fail to be inducted into Mobius, a snooty campus literary society, but he's not romantically interested in her. (This lack of interest pays off with one of the movie's best lines late in the film.)

Tracy's New Jerseyite mother suggests Tracy call Brooke, who is the daughter of her fiance. Sure, Brooke's a bit older, but she lives in Manhattan, maybe she can show Tracy around. Or maybe sweep her along in her wake, giving her the night of her young life. Tracy ends up spending the night in Brooke's illegal commercially zoned Times Square apartment and hearing all about Brooke's plans to open a ridiculous, fantastic restaurant that could never work in real life. By the time Tracy attends the spin class Brooke teaches in the morning, they're close as sisters.

But Tracy isn't just an adorable little sister Brooke can drag hither and yon. She's also a writer, and we all know how dangerous that can be. As Brooke unleashes her incessant and unfiltered torrent of opinions, ideas and non sequiturs, vampiric Tracy is filling up her notebooks.

For reasons that have as much to do with the conventions of screwball comedy as anything else, Brooke's unseen boyfriend Stavros -- a Greek financier who is exactly the sort of person she "hates," only she's "in love with him" -- abruptly backs out of his agreement to front Brooke the money to open the fantasy diner. And so Tracy arranges a trip to Greenwich to descend on the sleek modern mansion owned by Brooke's former boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus) and his wife, Mamie-Claire (a very funny Heather Lind), with whom Brooke has a fraught history. (Brooke believes she stole both her idea for what became a lucrative T-shirt line along with the wealthy Dylan.)

Accompanying them on the quest are semi-reluctant Tony (who has a car) and his possessive girlfriend Nicolette (Jasmine Cephas Jones). Surprisingly, the film's energy picks up when this posse arrives in Greenwich, crashing a book club made up mostly of pregnant women discussing Faulkner's The Hamlet.

It's snarky to say that ­Baumbach has made the year's best Woody Allen film, but the similarities are undismissable. There is a strain of Manhattan-centric insularity and privilege that runs through the movie, and while it might be taken as satire -- Dylan reminds the assembly that he hasn't always been a suburban burgher, that he used to live in the Village and was the sort of person people made TV shows about ("I was beautiful," he says) -- the too-pat ending leaves us with a sort of queasy feeling that Brooke and Tracy have been let off with warnings.

We're presented with a curious problem in talking about Mistress America; as I was leaving the theater I told my companion that it was one of those movies that I liked well enough but that I wasn't sure was really good. And now I'm writing a review of it and I still haven't made up my mind. I don't think Mistress America is as satisfying as While We're Young, which came out a few months ago. Part of me believes that ­Baumbach is relying too heavily on his dual muses -- Gerwig and Manhattan -- and that he might have made more of this idea had he and his co-writer (Gerwig) taken another pass at the script.

But what's the point of a muse if she demands rewrite?

MovieStyle on 09/04/2015

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