Mistress America (2015)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
A college freshman cures her disappointment and loneliness by allowing herself to be pulled into the wacky schemes of her future stepsister.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced Mistress America
What critics say influenced Mistress America
(Gerwig and Baumbach have acknowledged taking inspiration from Martin Scorsese's brilliant, similarly paced After Hours.)
Mistress America feels like something from 1986 or ’87, something that abuts Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, John Hughes and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.
Baumbach and Gerwig have both noted in interviews that Mistress America is in part inspired by those 1980s comedies—like Something Wild and After Hours —in which a preppy square falls under the spell of an outrageous bon vivant.
Gerwig concurred: “Like Something Wild and After Hours and kind of like, being pulled into this crazy thing, and there’s a motorcycle.”
"Mistress America" is a different kind of channeling, straight through the screwball comedies of the 1980s, "After Hours" and "Something Wild," back to "Bringing Up Baby," where Katharine Hepburn sang "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard while Cary Grant looked for the last bone (the intercostal clavicle) for his Brontosaurus skeleton.
In "Mistress America," Gerwig takes her second spin as Baumbach's co-writer and star (following "Frances Ha").
The film — Gerwig and filmmaker Noah Baumbach’s second screenwriting team-up, after “Frances Ha” — is also chaotic, though in a more controlled way.
Landing in theaters just three years after their memorable collaboration on 2012's " Frances Ha ," "Mistress America" arrives as a smart screwball lark that sees Gerwig and Baumbach playing once more in the same New York sandbox.
But instead of just tossing viewers a grab bag of gags, Baumbach and co-writer-slash-leading-lady Greta Gerwig (“Frances Ha”) manage to homogenize them, artfully bridging acts one and three while conjuring tons of laughs in the process.
Gerwig has the comic timing of every Howard Hawks heroine and the rampant positivity of a My Little Pony, but she typically finds herself in situations where her intoxicating on-screen persona is completely odds with a somewhat harsher reality, sometimes for the better (Damsels in Distress), sometimes for the worse (Frances Ha).
The duo previously collaborated on the irresistible “Frances Ha” (2013), one of my favorite recent films, which cast Gerwig as a 27-year-old New York dancer belatedly accepting the onset of adulthood; here, Gerwig is the babbling Brooke, a 30-year-old whirling dervish of a Manhattanite who becomes the fast, generous, eager friend of her simultaneously envious and judgmental new 18-year-old “sister,” Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke), an awkward, alienated Barnard College freshman with literary aspirations who describes campus life as “like being at a party where you don’t know anyone, all the time.”
Baumbach's film opens by introducing us relative newcomer Kirke, whose most prominent big-screen role to this point has been as a supporting character in "Gone Girl," but whose on-screen ease suggests she's destined for bigger things.
Talented relative newcomer Lola Kirke (memorable as the trailer park thief in “Gone Girl”) gives a natural and winning performance as Tracy, who arrives as a freshman at Barnard in New York City and is quickly overwhelmed by every facet of the college experience, from dealing with a petulant roommate to figuring out what to eat to worrying herself to death over whether she’ll be accepted by the campus literary magazine.
And Kirke, who had a small part in Gone Girl as the lowlife who robbed the conniving wife, establishes herself as an actor of considerable presence and skill.
Tracy's (Lola Kirke, "Gone Girl") first college semester in New York City isn't going the way she thought it would.
As Tracy, newcomer Lola Kirke is equally skilled at rapid-fire line readings, an impressive change of tone from her standout debut in “Gone Girl” as the trailer trash motel rat who befriended, then robbed that film’s runaway antiheroine.
Kirke, who some may recognize from David Fincher's "Gone Girl", gives a deceptively intense performance that only grows in stature.