Mis­tress America

Attempt­ing to break the world land-speed record for snap­py dia­logue deliv­ery, Noah Baum­bach returns with his sec­ond fea­ture of 2015 which tips its rak­ish­ly-angled straw boater at the screw­ball hey­day of Hecht, Hawks and Sturges (The Palm Bitch Story?).

Mis­tress Amer­i­ca refers to two things: one is Gre­ta Gerwig’s char­ac­ter, Brooke, a hap­py-clap­py career flake with the gift of the gab, but whose words are as shal­low as a pud­dle. Her entry is daz­zling, tip-toe­ing pre­car­i­ous­ly down some stairs on Times Square, mov­ing too fast for com­fort, always look­ing like she’s just about to make a life-end­ing tum­ble. Phys­i­cal self-preser­va­tion is sec­ondary to the bub­bly enter­tain­ments that lay ahead of her.

She offers a some­what aca­d­e­m­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the human trait of impul­sive­ness, its exhil­a­rat­ing in-the-moment joys as well as the pangs of the regret it pro­duces once bit­ter real­i­ty sets in. She is emblem­at­ic of The Amer­i­can Dream, the roman­tic notion of grab­bing that chance while it’s there in front of you and fly­ing blind­ly but pur­pose­ful­ly into the sun, what­ev­er the con­se­quences may be.

Mis­tress Amer­i­ca also refers to an idea for a glossy, apoc­ryphal TV dra­ma, one which Brooke reveals to Lola Kirke’s Tra­cy, a timid Eng­lish lit major who, due to the impend­ing mar­riage of their par­ents, is set to become her step sis­ter. The pair hit it off instant­ly, with Tra­cy sim­ply hap­py to allow the giant break­ers of Brooke’s unal­loyed enthu­si­asm to crash over her. And hey, the longer she basks in Brooke’s immense shad­ow, the more A mate­r­i­al she pur­loins for her short stories.

The film has much in com­mon with Baumbach’s pre­vi­ous, While We’re Young, in that a sur­face-lev­el inves­ti­ga­tion into con­tem­po­rary social mores (liv­ing in Brook­lyn is so passé!, etc) cov­ers up its more intel­lec­tu­al sub-themes, notably the ques­tion of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. The script is struc­tured around a num­ber of cas­es of ideas being for­mu­lat­ed, appro­pri­at­ed and maligned, and it even­tu­al­ly seems to sug­gest that there can nev­er be a sin­gle rigid law which irrev­o­ca­bly con­nects cre­ative endeav­our to the per­son who coined it. It asks the ques­tion, when is an idea an idea? And is it still the same idea if some­one else takes it and exe­cutes it? It sounds a tad heavy, but this is all swad­dled under lay­ers of brisk com­ic levity.

Gerwig’s char­ac­ter is extreme­ly sim­i­lar to the one she played in Whit Stillman’s Damsels In Dis­tress, a per­son whose go-get­ting nature makes it dif­fi­cult for her to forge mean­ing­ful bonds with nor­mal peo­ple. There are self-con­scious barbs at social media and lit­er­ary phoneys which will no doubt make the movie age about as well as 1995 San­dra Bul­lock vehi­cle, The Net. It’s a fun­ny film, but one of those fun­ny films where your brain will be telling you that what you’re watch­ing is fun­ny, but will refuse to fire the synaps­es that would duly evoke a phys­i­cal response. It offers a brand of humour that results in an inter­nal ges­ture of wry acknowl­edge­ment rather than actu­al hon­est-to-good­ness laughing.

Though it would be easy to say that Lola Kirke is MVP here, main­ly because her char­ac­ter is the one with whom it is most easy to relate, the major­i­ty of kudos deserves to be direct­ed at Ger­wig, who has man­aged to cre­ate a char­ac­ter who con­sis­tent­ly deflects our empa­thy, but in a strange and not-alto­geth­er-com­pre­hen­si­ble man­ner, she still opens her­self up enough to earn it. Her Brooke, we dis­cov­er, is stealth­ily guile­less, and her bom­bas­tic con­fi­dence a mere defence mech­a­nism against the peo­ple she thinks are out to rip her off.