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Greta Gerwig lets her co-stars share the spotlight in Mistress America
BActress Greta Gerwig has been called the female Woody Allen, and, like Allen, she tends to be a rather polarizing on-screen figure. Many rave about her talent, but some, like myself, find her rather annoying. Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised by her latest movie, Mistress America, an ensemble vehicle that was quite funny, in no small part due to Gerwig herself.
Gerwig is not the star of Mistress America; instead. the film is actually about Tracy (Lola Kirke) a freshman at prestigious New York City university who is having a great deal of difficulty making friends. Then, Tracy meets Brooke (Gerwig), whose father is engaged to Tracy’s mother (Kathryn Erbe). Brooke soon becomes a most unsuitable mentor for the fascinated Tracy and begins imparting her rather flawed wisdom to the younger woman.
When we meet Brooke for the first time in Mistress America, she seems pretty much like Gerwig’s standard self-assured motormouth who expounds on everything under the sun. However, what the film realizes, even though Brooke and Tracy don’t, is that Brooke is a completely incompetent dilettante who hasn’t the ability or gumption to follow through on anything. Noah Baumbach (who directed Mistress America and co-wrote it with Gerwig) recognizes her character flaws and lets them play out in an extended set piece that takes up most of the second half of the 84-minute movie. Brooke, with Tracy in tow, goes uninvited to Connecticut to meet her former roommate Mamie-Claire (Heather LInd) to get funding for a restaurant Brooke wants to open. Of course, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize, as Mamie-Claire soon does, that any restaurant with which Brooke is involved is certain to be a spectacular failure. Not surprisingly, Brooke’s reunion with Mamie-Claire starts out hilariously bad and spirals out of control after that. It’s a true ensemble sequence, with eight different actors having significant screen time, that often descends to madcap farce. Baumbach’s comedies often have a dark underside to them, and Brooke’s character is essentially pathetic. However, the movie’s rapid pace ensures that Mistress America never actually becomes gloomy. Instead, the laughs keep coming in what winds up being one of the funnier movies of the year.
Continue reading on Mistress America: Mini-review
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