Noah Baumbach has once again proved himself to be the greatest living director making films about New York City, bar none. Many have made the Woody Allen comparison, which is fair - both utilise seemingly incidental conversation to map out subtle nuances of character and story, all the while being sweet, well-meaning and, above all, very, very funny. But Baumbach is perhaps even more unapologetic with his characters, unafraid to make them openly grating or obnoxious, forcing the audience to work harder to find the honesty and vulnerability behind their middle-class foibles.
It doesn't always work, as we saw with the insufferably annoying Greenberg, but, more often than not, it does, against all odds - and the key to his success is a good, compatible performer. It is here, then, that I believe Baumbach has won the lottery in the form of Greta Gerwig, who may be one of the greatest acting talents of her generation. She was astonishingly good in Frances Ha, which could have so easily slipped into the more pretentious side of mumblecore territory; instead, we had a near-perfect portrait of what it means to be young and alone and scared about the future in New York City, all the while trying to hold on to a desperately fragile sense of identity.
We're on similar ground with Mistress America, though the riffs on the theme are as enjoyable as ever. In fact, it's a bit of a hybrid between Frances and his last effort, While We're Young; the focus of the story is on a young millennial Tracy (Lola Kirke), who's feeling scared and alone at college. The details of this section are spot-on: her campus is entirely made up of exclusive cliques and impersonal study groups, and it seems like everyone else is having a better time than you.
It is this that drives Tracy to look up Brooke (Gerwig), who is set to become her step-sister after their parents marry. The two meet, and instantly there is a spark, a connection. Brooke takes her on a whirlwind tour of New York where we see the identity she has formed for herself: she visits bars and dances on stage, she tweets relentlessly, she is constantly switching between trains of thought mid-conversation. She's endearingly annoying, too, in that hipster-bohemian sort of way: when someone takes a photo of her kissing a bassist she says, "Must we document our lives all the time? Must we?"
The secret to Baumbach and Gerwig's success in films like these is that the audience is not invited to judge Brooke too harshly. She is clearly vulnerable, if unable to express it clearly - she complains about her best friend stealing her fiancé and cats, and jarringly announces, mid-dance, that her mother died when she was younger. She is also, as Tracy discovers, insatiable fun to be around - the picture comes alive whenever she is on-screen, and sags ever-so-slightly whenever she is absent.
There is also much in the film itself dedicated to the very act of judging character. While spending time with Brooke, Tracy writes a short story entitled "Mistress America", where she writes half-formed observations about her that appear on the voiceover: "Her youth had died and she was now dragging around the decaying corpse." Yet the tables turn when her story is discovered and read by Brooke - and a group of her friends - who become angry with Tracy for trying to re-purpose her experiences into something that will earn her entry into a superior literary club. We are almost equally guilty of thinking we knew Brooke after spending little over an hour with her. Much is left unsaid: the most important moment in the film comes when her fiancé, Dylan (Michael Chernus) asks her if she's doing okay and she responds, "No... I'm not..." before being interrupted.
It is not a perfect film. The third act in Connecticut is a swerve in tone; Brooke and the gang go to persuade her rich fiancé to finance her restaurant idea, and the film becomes a stage-like comedy of errors that could have easily come from a different film. It also lacks some of the raw, infectious energy of Frances Ha, even if the result is ultimately more polished. But this is still a very fine film - one of the best comedies of the year, I suspect - that, once again, proves Baumbach and Gerwig are a real force to be reckoned with.
★★★★
