I’m not sure when exactly we all had a vote about this but at some point in the last five years we all seem to have agreed that Greta Gerwig was the face, voice and personality of a new independent movement. I am not complaining. In fact, as rejected as I feel for having been left completely out of the decision-making process I am content with how it all turned out. 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 latest film in which Greta Gerwig has been tasked with not only playing a character but representing a whole generation is Mistress America, co-written and co-produced by Gerwig herself and co-written and directed by Noah Baumbach. It is their third collaboration after Greenberg and Frances Ha (the latter of which Gerwig also co-wrote), and it plays like a 21st century Gatsby, with Gerwig as the larger than life subject of a young New York City transplant’s admiration, adoration, fascination and ultimately pity.
Lola Kirke plays Tracy, a prospective writer trying to make it in college, but she can feel herself flowering on the walls. Her mother is getting married again, and she will soon have an older stepsister named Brooke (Gerwig), who just happens to live in the city too. They meet, they fall in deep amiableness, they have adventures, and Tracy writes about it all as Brooke’s perfect little life falls apart, and as Brooke struggles to build it back up again using a quirky combination of mysticism, stalking and guilt trips.
At first glance Mistress America probably has less to say than it does to recognize. Here in Brooke’s great big persona, which infects every humdrum soul around her with a similar (though typically more awkward) flamboyance, is a creature of universality. She talks a big game but looks like she’s happier and more successful than she really is, and like so many of us she runs from success when it’s nearly in her grasp, because putting forth the actual effort would be hard. Brooke describes the sense of relief that comes from giving up on a dream, and we’ve all been there at some point (and if you haven’t, you will), and there’s an undeniable melancholy to that which borders on pure sympathy.
So there’s the simplistic truth: yeah, she’s us. And Tracy is onto us. Tracy looks at Brooke with the puppy dog fascination of a introvert judging outwardly, a little bit jealous and a little bit superior. She complains that college was supposed to be a time when she meets new people, and parties, and gets in adventures and expands her horizons, and Brooke provides like a genie in a bottle. But Tracy can’t help but view her prospective step-sister with a car crash fascination. She writes about Brooke the way F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the Lost Generation, full of warmth but a little bit sad, and it’s to Brooke’s credit that when she finally catches wind of Tracy’s musings, she doesn’t care for this portrayal one bit.
Brooke, not unlike Gerwig herself (regardless of the indie persona we project upon her), is not a representation. She is not an “It Girl,” she’s just a human being who happens to have a spectacular personality. Within the film and without, we want to watch her, we want to follow her adventures, and we all hope she turns out okay in the end. And yet there’s something so incredibly arch about Baumbach’s twee affectations in Mistress America that it makes it nearly impossible to view Brooke as a wholly real person. Her comments are too cute, the music too spot on. But of course we are watching Tracy’s story unfold, not Brooke’s, and to Tracy it’s all just a big metaphor for what’s going on right now, with people, with a generation, but with a subtext that doesn’t quite match her immature presumptions.
Watching Gerwig fight to give Brooke dignity in a story that is specifically designed, by the protagonist mind you, to use her for intellectual sport is a grand and complex experience. She’s breaking out as she’s breaking down and we love her for it, even when frustrates us by being too much like ourselves. We look out, we look in, we look down, we look up, and everywhere there is We. Greta Gerwig is We, Brooke is We, and Tracy is looking at all of us saying “Go Team, Go” while writing down that we’re probably going to fail, but fail nobly at least.
Images via Fox Searchlight
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
