Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Mistress America

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2015)

    In Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, the title character was trying to build a life in New York City.  In Mistress America, Tracy, a college freshman in New York, feels isolated and contacts Brooke, the daughter of the man whom Tracy’s mother is soon to marry.   Brooke has been in New York for some time and knows her way around the place.  Frances was played by Greta Gerwig, who now plays Brooke – Gerwig looks to have switched from the role of rookie to that of the mentor who will show neophyte Tracy (Lola Kirke) the New York ropes.  That first impression is deceptive.  By the end of Mistress America, which covers just a few weeks in the protagonists’ lives, Tracy, who wants to be a writer, has been accepted as a member of the college lit society she was desperate to get into.  She feels she’s learned things about life from Brooke and has also quickly put her to good literary use.  Brooke, on the other hand, has emerged as a congenital loser in love and in money-making:  she’s packing up her life in New York and moving to Los Angeles.  Her decision has a back-to-square-one dimension beyond the narrative frame of Mistress America.  Frances in the earlier film was a native Californian; so is Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote this film, as she co-wrote Frances Ha, with Noah Baumbach.

    Brooke has just turned thirty and Tracy is eighteen.  Their ages matter, to Brooke and to viewers of the film.  Brooke regularly visits a psychic (Seth Barrish) and Tracy tags along a couple of times.  When the psychic refers to Tracy as ‘the young one’, Brooke insists that there’s ‘Only ten, twelve years between us – we’re contemporaries!’  Brooke has a point – and not only in the sense that it’s important to the film’s dynamic that the younger girl is revealed to be the less naive of the two.  Brooke’s protest also brings to mind the moment in Frances Ha when the heroine is told that, compared with her friend and actual contemporary Sophie, ‘You seem a lot older but less grown up’.  A difficulty I had with Mistress America was in the casting and performance of Lola Kirke.  She is actually twenty-four and that’s what she looks; her voice is low-pitched (I often found it hard to make out what she was saying) compared with Greta Gerwig’s.  But it’s only these external elements that confuse the relative ages of Tracy and Brooke.  (Gerwig was thirty-one when the film was being made.)  Lola Kirke doesn’t suggest any kind of inner maturity or express Tracy’s capacity to use people – a capacity totally lacking in her older stepsister-to-be.  Kirke’s  performance is dull beyond what’s required of a foil to the more comically adventurous Gerwig.

    Greta Gerwig makes a great entrance, as Brooke comes down a flight of steps to meet Tracy for the first time, in Times Square.  You smile at this first sight of Gerwig’s exuberant awkwardness (and at first hearing of Brooke too, on the other end of Tracy’s phone).  She kept me smiling for a good few minutes but Mistress America is excessively dependent on her charm and skill and, although neither is in doubt, Gerwig isn’t showing much here that she hasn’t shown before.   I laughed only once:  when Brooke gets angry with Tracy for using her as short story material, Tracy says that’s what writers do and asks what Tennessee Williams would have amounted to if he’d not  done the same, and Brooke yells, ‘I don’t give a shit – Tennessee Williams isn’t my friend!’   (Tracy’s short story is called ‘Mistress America’, referring to a super-heroine dreamed up by Brooke, not her.)  Brooke’s outburst is by far the best moment in an overlong sequence at the spectacular Connecticut home of her former boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus) and Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), his new partner.   Mamie-Claire stole, as well as Dylan, Brooke’s two cats and the commercial idea that’s paid for the spectacular house.  Brooke has come to ask Dylan for money to start up a restaurant (her subsequent boyfriend has deserted her and this enterprise) and the showdown in Connecticut involves several other people:  Tony (Matthew Shear), Tracy’s fellow freshman who also writes fiction and who’s chauffeured her and Brooke to Dylan’s; Tony’s pathologically possessive girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who has just that one characteristic; Karen (Cindy Cheung), a lawyer friend of Mamie-Claire; and a disgruntled neighbour (Dean Wareham).   This plays like one of those scenes in the theatre when a writer has contrived to get virtually the whole cast together but isn’t sure what to do next, and has to keep giving everyone the odd line to justify their presence on stage.

    As you’d expect, Baumbach and Gerwig have written plenty of smart dialogue and the players are never less than proficient.  (I liked the actor – uncredited on the IMDB listing – who plays Brooke’s neighbour Karim, with a graceful deadpan humour.)  But Mistress America is thin and has an acrid flavour that reminded me more of Margot at the Wedding than of any of Baumbach’s three intervening films.  Exploiting a personal relationship for creative writing purposes is obviously a theme of Margot too; the forthcoming wedding that sets the story running doesn’t happen in Mistress America either.  The marriage between Tracy’s mother (Kathryn Erbe) and Brooke’s (unseen) father is just a mechanism to get Brooke and Tracy together – nothing in their interactions conveys a sense of what either one feels about the prospect of a lifelong familial relationship.  The tone of Tracy’s final voiceover is elegiac; she suggests that zany, romantic individuals like Brooke are a dying breed.  It’s hard to see how Tracy knows this and odd that she’s nostalgic for a type of person she’s experienced only in Brooke but perhaps it’s the (artificial?) narrative voice of Tracy the writer, rather than the voice of Tracy the character, that we’re hearing.   The trailer for Mistress America is to be thoroughly recommended.  Unfortunately, it contains most of the best bits of a disappointing film.

    20 August 2015

     

  • The Diary of a Teenage Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marielle Heller (2015)

    According to an article on the University of Michigan website, Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures has been described as ‘one of the bleakest and most brilliant books ever written about growing up female’.   The teenage girl in question is Minnie Goetz; she grows up in San Francisco in the 1970s (as did Phoebe Gloeckner).  Although it may be unusual for a graphic novel, Gloeckner’s traumatic coming-of-age story doesn’t feel that unusual as a subject for film drama (Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is one recent example that comes to mind).  The first-time director Marielle Heller, who also wrote the screenplay for The Diary of a Teenage Girl, has made efforts – in the casting, construction and design of the film – to overcome this problem of familiarity, so that you’re at least persistently reminded of the stylised nature of her source material.

    The eccentric features of Bel Powley, who plays Minnie, give her a cartoon quality.  Alexander Skarsgård is Monroe, the loafer-boyfriend of Minnie’s self-styled bohemian mother Charlotte (Kirsten Wiig) and the man with whom Minnie has her first sexual experiences.  Skarsgård is both tall and handsome to such an improbable extent that he can easily function as a fantasy figure; his and Powley’s naturalistic acting contrasts effectively with their emblematic looks.  As its title indicates, Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel is a combination of text and image.   Heller reflects this duality well enough:  the dramatised action is, in effect, the pictures and Minnie’s narrative – the diary she creates in the form of tape recordings – the words.  Minnie’s aspirations to becoming a comic book author and illustrator also give Marielle Heller a pretext for the animated art work that repeatedly pops up on the screen.  At the start, the animation has wit and charm but it comes to seem decorative rather than integral – an increasingly spurious attempt to make Minnie’s adolescence distinctive, as well as to lighten what is, as that quote above suggests, a pretty grim story.

    The first part works well.  Minnie, eager to lose her virginity, thinks that she’s overweight and unattractive.  It’s comical that a fifteen-year-old girl with her self-image should fantasise about Monroe – a man old enough to be her father but hot enough to make Minnie’s mother feel younger.   Because you take to Bel Powley, who develops considerable emotional range over the course of the film, you can’t help being pleased that Minnie’s fantasy quickly becomes reality.  As soon as it does, however, your own sense of reality kicks in.    For anyone who last saw Alexander Skarsgård (as I did) in What Maisie Knew (2012), his role in Diary of a Teenage Girl is startling.  I described his character in that earlier film as ‘a dream father and a big brother’ to Maisie, a little girl in need of both.  This association makes Skarsgård in Teenage Girl more disturbing as a man who exploits the desires of an underage girl.  What’s more, his integrity as an actor means that he resists the temptation to make Monroe nothing but a nasty sexual predator – he’s more complex than that label suggests.

    Although her character is relatively thin, Kirsten Wiig is very funny – especially in the pep talk that Charlotte, unaware of what’s going on between Minnie and Monroe, gives her daughter, urging her to be more sexually self-promoting.  Wiig is then appallingly funny when, after Charlotte finds out about the relationship from playing one of Minnie’s tapes, she decides that Monroe should marry her child.  The main cast is strong throughout.  Christopher Meloni is witty as Minnie’s pompous academic stepfather (her biological father was a short-lived relationship during Charlotte’s hippy heyday).  All the other youngsters do well:  Austin Lyon as a boy of Minnie’s own age who fancies her but then finds her sexual appetite too much for him; Madeleine Waters as her friend Kimmie; and Abby Wait as her half-sister Gretel.

    The Diary of a Teenage Girl is very different from Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood in style, tone, and ethnic and geographical contexts.  Yet there is a kind of correspondence in the narrative structure and conclusion of the two films.  The heroine eventually resists various other influences, users and abusers to become her own person.  Unlike her politically opinionated, superficially feminist mother, Minnie finds that she doesn’t need a man, although she doesn’t decide on being gay either.  The only woman she does need is a creative role model – the real-life underground comics artist Aline Kominsky, who inspires (and encourages) Minnie’s work.

    12 August 2015

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