Aubrey MaloneMistress America (15A)
Nobody does the frenetic intellectualisation of mundanity better than Woody Allen. I mentioned in my review of While We’re Young some months back that Noah Baumbach was a worthy successor to him. I can confirm that view with Baumbach’s latest, which has the same neurotic energy as that film, and indeed a similar plagiarism theme, which is ironic considering we could accuse Baumbach himself of plagiarising Allen.
Tracy (Lola Kirke) is a lonely New York university student with literary aspirations. Her life changes dramatically when she meets up with Brooke (Greta Gerwig), a young woman whose father is about to marry Tracy’s mother. Brooke takes Tracy out of herself and they start to hang out together, Tracy becoming fascinated by the adrenalised personality of her soon-to-be-stepsister.
Brooke is about to open a restaurant but is having some problems raising the money. With this in mind she recruits Tracy’s friend Tony (Matthew Shear) to drive the pair of them to the home of a friend, Dylan (Michael Chernus) in the leafy suburbs of Connecticut. Dylan, she feels, might be able to bale her out financially because he ‘owes’ her, being married to a woman who stole Brook’s idea for a T-shirt patent some time back.
The film descends into farce here when a group of people who really should have better things to do find themselves huddled into a group formed with the express purpose of critiquing a short story Tracy has written about Brooke which threatens to scupper their relationship. Up to this point, Baumbach’s fluid imagination and inventive screenplay (which he›s co-written with Gerwig) have been shown to their best advantage but at this juncture the film becomes nothing short of farcical.
Afterwards, I found it difficult to recover the suspension of disbelief that made the film work so well for me up until then. Put simply, he goes too far with the satire that’s always been his forte, settling instead for a screwball sense of self-parody.
This apart, it’s a brilliant film which tackles everything from fragile friendships to rugged ambition to the dubious delights of the contemporary café culture. Baumbach is a master of comic timing and he’s transmitted this to a quality cast, all of whom scrub up admirably for the occasion, from the sleep-eyed Kirke to the garrulous Gerwig to the kooky Chernus, etc.
We’re presented with a conglomerate of characters who wouldn’t look out of place in a Robert Altman film, and indeed who seem to be imbued with the same bewildered angst. They walk in and out of each other’s lives dripping one-liners like honey as they examine their metaphorical navels with hilarious self-absorption.
Mistress America is a laugh-out-loud funny film that provides proof yet again that nobody is better than the Americans at sending themselves up when they put their minds to it. This becomes a more precious quality when it’s Noah Baumbach that’s behind the wheel, even a Noah Baumbach that has Woody Allen glancing over his shoulder at every turn in some shape or form.
Now that Woody is approaching his 80th year and slinking into the celluloid sunset, I’ll welcome even a second string successor to his gilded template.