Mistress America is writer-director Noah Baumbach’s second film scheduled for release this year. The other, more accessible film being liberated next month is While We’re Young, and it tackles issues of time and growing up. In Mistress America it’s clear that nobody in this movie has any intention of growing up at all.
Baumbach’s tone of whimsical living and rich privilege was explored with a more delicate hand in his 2013 film Frances Ha. The characters there bordered on loathsome at times, but the story always knew when to pull back and not overindulge in the negative. With Mistress America, Baumbach has once again returned to direct as well as co-write the screenplay with star Greta Gerwig. It’s as if they saw Frances Ha as an appetizer to promote aimless and privileged characters, only to go full throttle this time around.
Much like Frances Ha, Gerwig, for better or worse, commands the screen in Mistress America as Brooke, a wannabe New York power player who has high hopes of ambition in many different fields. When she’s not fast-talking about tackling one impossible goal, she’s daydreaming about another one, all the while clueless to the reality around her. In an attempt to give her some drive, her fatigued father introduces her to Tracy (Lola Kirke), the daughter of the woman he is preparing to marry. Tracy is a naïve college freshman and she gullibly eats up all of Brooke’s wild fantasies and tall tales to the point that the two quickly become inseparable. The two go on random city treks together, randomly crash people’s homes and battle it out for who can make the biggest idiot out of themselves first.
Maturity is a poison to the characters in Mistress America and maybe that’s the point Baumbach is trying to make, but if that’s the case, he already made it with Frances Ha. The loud and annoying antics on display would be something the younger Tracy could maybe get away with due to inexperience, but for the older Brooke it’s just embarrassing. If a normal person did these things they’d be locked up in an insane asylum, but in Mistress America they’re celebrated as bold and innovative.
Much like Whit Stillman before him, Baumbach is quickly excelling at asking for sympathy for his characters when they’re anything but sympathetic. He was able to find the right balance between compassion and rebellion in his seminal work The Squid and the Whale, and I even defended his hardly accessible Greenberg, but Mistress America is a step too far in the wrong direction.
Rating: C-
Mistress America premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.