I think most of us have known a fraudulent charmer like Brooke, though it helps to be young and susceptible to fall under such sway.
Tracy (Lola Kirke) is new to New York, a Barnard freshman whose mother is slated to marry some guy with a daughter living in the city. That would be Brooke (Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote “Mistress America” with director Noah Baumbach).
Now since Brooke subsists mainly on air and optimism — much of it unfounded — we know the filmmakers are thinking of Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (plus a splash of Auntie Mame). Yet she’s also a savvy millennial who lives and breathes startup culture — if not a fashion label, then a restaurant or TV show, maybe. She claims to despise social media, yet is fluent in viral marketing.
She’s a font of alluring ideas — business is the new sex — who lacks only the capital to implement them. Or, to put it another way, her capital is youth and dreams, which are losing market value as she nears 30.
Don’t worry, though: While economic stresses may be raging against Brooke (Tracy meanwhile taking notes for her campus literary journal), this is a blithe, delightful comedy — not some sort of Jamesian downfall.
Brooke is both eccentric and unsinkable, and Gerwig plays her just to the edge of being unlikable for such obstinate self-belief. If one boyfriend’s cash abruptly dries up and her loft’s locks are changed, she’ll go back to another beau — no matter that he’s since remarried and living in Greenwich.
Her boundless self-confidence is gradually revealed to be self-delusion (or a manic confluence of the two), which is entirely Gerwig’s point as actress and writer. Brooke is the one arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but she does it so well, so artfully, that you want to sit with her and sip martinis and judge those passengers who haven’t dressed properly for the lifeboats. She’s never short of opinions and grudges; they’re strategic assets to her, though forever fired in the wrong direction.
Baumbach and Gerwig, a couple who previously collaborated on “Frances Ha,” are obvious movie lovers, and there are willfully retro traces here of screwball comedy, drawing-room farce, and early Woody Allen. Tracy drags along two college friends to support Brooke’s Greenwich pitch for restaurant funding, and the three young interlopers become an incredulous audience to Brooke’s audacity and “moxie” (the word is uncorked twice, like vintage champagne).
Significantly, when it comes time to make her presentation, Brooke is gripped with stage fright; and it’s timid Tracy, her newly emboldened Boswell, who saves the day. Fluttering Brooke has a genius for inspiration, but as her old Greenwich nemesis puts it, “She has no follow-through.”
No matter. “Mistress America” gives us the comedy of catastrophe averted, if not plans realized. In a forgiving but not unrealistic way, the movie is a sunnier, distaff retelling of “The Great Gatsby,” where failure and self-reinvention are one and the same thing.
“Mistress America”
Story of a new-to-New York college student (Lola Kirke) who befriends her soon-to-be sister-in-law Brooke (Greta Gerwig), a Holly Golightly for millennials. “Mistress America” is a bittersweet comic fable of one woman becoming another woman’s entry into a wider world — reaching a crisis point that is both serious and amusing. Director Noah Baumbach and Gerwig collaborated on the movie, which is a mix of screwball comedy and early Woody Allen.
Rating: R, for language including some sexual references
Showing: Guild 45th, SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
