Noah Baumbach’s ‘Mistress America’

Only four months ago I posted about Noah Baumbach’s comedy While We Were Young and now his Mistress America has just been released in the UK. Although both films are set in current-day New York and both share a theme of the implications for friendships of differences in age, in fact Mistress America has more in common with Baumbach’s 2012 Frances Ha. For a start both those films were co-written by Baumbach with Greta Gerwig who also takes the eponymous leading parts.

The plot of Mistress America spans the eight weeks or so between the start of the university year and Thanksgiving. Tracy (Lola Kirke) has just started her degree in English Literature and is finding it hard to make her mark on campus socially or with the elite Mobius Society of would-be literati. Her mother is remarrying and encourages Tracy to get in touch with her soon-to-be older stepsister, Brooke (Gerwig). Brooke is 30, Tracy 18, ages at which the difference between them ("contemporaries" blags Brooke at one point) is more significant than it would be at 54 and 42, say. At first Tracy is dazzled by Brooke’s knowledge of the ropes and tropes of the youthful Manhattan lifestyle but she soon realises that Brooke is all hat and no cattle. Tracy’s depiction of a thinly-disguised Brooke in a short story gives the film its name and gains Tracy entry to Mobius.

Brooke’s fanciful plans to open a restaurant hit a financial crisis and she decides to seek funds from a wealthy former boy-friend Dylan (Michael Chernus), now married to a former rival of Brooke’s, Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), and living in a splendidly positioned Modernist house in Connecticut. Tracy and a couple of her fellow students in tow, Brooke doorsteps Dylan and with the support of Dylan's paediatrician neighbour and a pregnant friend of Mamie-Claire, a seven-person ensemble piece ensues. Eventually Brooke is extricated from her money problems and decides to leave town.

Frances Ha appears in Wikipedia’s list of Mumblecore movies, “characterized by low budget production values and amateur actors, heavily focused on naturalistic dialogue”. I have to confess that the early parts of Mistress America, set in a student milieu and with young actors speaking contemporary American, were not easy for my ageing English ears to follow. Interestingly the Connecticut sequence with older actors presented no such problem. There is some very witty dialogue throughout and Gerwig, only 32, has a great comic talent as performer and presumably as a writer. She sees the professional side of her relationship with Baumbach as having parallels with the great song-writing partnerships and she may well be right. Hopefully there is much more to come from them.

I think the critics’ ratings of 4* and 5* for Mistress America are a little generous, perhaps there isn’t much else around in August, although I sometimes wonder whether I’ve seen the same film. In the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews gushed:

It stars a Greta Gerwig more than ever resembling cinema’s earlier Greta G, her tomboy-Garbo features ideal for the title-nicknamed heroine.

Gerwig has many strengths, but being Garboesque is surely not one of them. Andrews then tells his readers that:

During a house-party weekend, half a dozen Brooke-related characters, indentured to her worship, form tableau vivant tribunals to critique Tracy’s acidic, Brooke-based short story, titled Mistress America.

It wasn’t a house-party weekend, two of the three other women present didn’t like Brooke at all and nobody moves or speaks in a tableau vivant. (I guess Andrews is busy brushing up his Kurosawa).

By the way, at one point on her own in Brooke’s squat, Tracy settles down with a drink from a bottle whose label ends “…ET”. Lillet Blanc is an aperitif produced in the Gironde in South West France, not well-known in the UK but popular for a long time in New York and other sophisticated parts of the US  as a cocktail ingredient. Supposedly the American taste for it was acquired on the transatlantic liners. Personally I find Lillet too sweet, even when served well-chilled as recommended. Unlike Mistress America in which Baumbach and Gerwig have the balance between the comic and the acerbic about right.


UPDATE 2 September

Richard Brody, The New Yorker's veteran film critic, whose views are far more worth reading than mine, has a very high opinion of Mistress America:

... “Mistress America” is a masterwork of literary cinema in the other, qualitative sense: it isn’t merely about literature; it’s a work of brilliant writing, one of the most exquisite of recent screenplays.

Noah Baumbach’s ‘While We’re Young’

I came away from this film with mixed feelings about it. So you may prefer reviewers who are both more knowledgeable and more encouraging, like Mark Kermode in the Observer or Richard Brody in the New Yorker. For a start, both these critics are familiar with all of Baumbach’s films, while I’ve only seen Frances Ha and The Squid and the Whale. And by the way, Richard Brody hints that, as in the latter, there is an autobiographical element to this film as well.

While We’re Young is a comedy about two married couples in New York, the Srebnicks, Josh and Cornelia, and the Massies, Jamie and Darby. Josh and Cornelia are childless forty-somethings who are starting to find themselves isolated from their baby-producing contemporaries. The Massies are twenty years younger, hipsterish and at first sight unlikely friends for the Srebnicks. However Josh is a documentary film-maker, a field in which Jamie has considerable ambitions lurking under his disarmingly laid-back manner. Josh has been stuck on a project for years and part of the younger couple’s attraction for him is the possibility of rejuvenation. The film is a chronicle of the Srebnicks’ becoming enchanted with a more youthful scene and tastes than their own, and their inevitable disenchantment and return to familiar territory, no older but possibly wiser. Naomi Watts’ Cornelia is just as convincing a half of the troubled couple as Ben Stiller’s Josh; her appearance seems to change quite subtly between scenes, sometimes looking her age and then not. Adam Driver’s Jamie skilfully conveys an ‘almost too good to be true’ quality from the start.

Various reviewers in the UK have compared Baumbach and Woody Allen, and certainly the New York settings and characters appear familiar, as is wondering just how either couple manages to stay solvent in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Stiller’s Josh certainly has something about him of the characters Allen has played in his own films over the years. But I was interested to read that Baumbach is an admirer of the late Eric Rohmer, to the extent that his son is called Rohmer. You could argue that While We’re Young is as much a Moral Tale as a comedy, although Rohmer never overloaded his plots like this one. Not only are there the inevitable complexities of two couples getting close – a Cornelia-Jamie thing almost develops - but Cornelia’s father, yet another documentary-maker, is a significant character and there are two films, documentaries inevitably, within the film. A familiarity with Nanook of the North, Direct Cinema (cinema vérité - I want to see Wiseman’s National Gallery), and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire can only be helpful.

The film starts, Rohmer-style, with a quotation, in this case from Ibsen’s The Master Builder when Solness expresses fear of the younger generation knocking at his door. In the play Solness's involvement with a much younger woman ends in tragedy. While We’re Young certainly has its serious moments, for example debating the responsibilities of a documentary-maker. But I was left thinking that the over cute ‘one-year-later’ ending let the film down. Nonetheless I will try to catch up with Baumbach’s Greenberg and Margot at the Wedding and look out for Mistress America – later this year?