Mistress America *** (2015, Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Seth Barrish) – Movie Review

Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s bitter-sweet comedy stars Lola Kirke as Tracy, a lonely college freshman at Barnard University, whose New York way of life is turned upside down by her impetuously adventurous soon-to-be stepsister Brooke (Greta Gerwig) and her mad schemes.

Mistress America is witty, clever and sporadically amusing in Baumbach’s typically deadpan sort of way. But it’s also typically irritating at times, with the characters and their actions and thoughts as frustrating as charming in the screenplay by Baumbach and Gerwig. Certainly Brooke’s mad schemes don’t come over on the alluring side.

Both actresses are excellent in their tailor-made roles, making you aware it’s unusual to have a movie almost entirely about two women like this, particularly two women of slightly different generations, Kirke round 2o and Gerwig about 30. Both the characters and the actresses play like updates on Annie Hall, which is either charming and funny or annoying, or all three, depending on taste. This is important as the film motors on their personalities.

Short as it is, at 84 minutes, this slight effort has trouble filling the running time. But it’s a tribute to the casual seeming nature of the work that Baumbach proceeds with meticulous precision, doing 55 takes with Gerwig and Kirke searching through a closet in one scene. Yet Baumbach manages to maintain a documentary-style freshness, brightness and air of reality, which is the film’s best feature and biggest attraction.

Baumbach has been in a relationship with co-author Gerwig since 2011. He was formerly married to Jennifer Jason Leigh, by whom he has a son called Rohmer, after the French film director. ‘My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical,’ he says.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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