Mistress America

MISTRESS AMERICA   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2015

IDEA:  An introverted college freshman reluctantly meets up with her gregarious, soon-to-be stepsister, and instantly becomes enamored of her boldly enterprising lifestyle.

BLURB:  Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s latest and most jocular tag-along with floundering millenials, a vibrant snapshot of young middle-class ambition stoked and arrested by uncertain creative potential. Baumbach punches up the pacing and dialogue to veritably screwball-level speeds, but he never lets the relative weight of his themes get compromised. On the contrary, his characters’ blithe patter keeps underlining what they lack, and his zaniest, most manic scenes, including a marvelously sustained romp at a wealthy designer’s mansion, are often the ones that chip away at their delusions best. The script, co-written by Gerwig, is loaded with witty, pithy quotes that manage to sound profoundly real and archly theatrical at the same time, the latter effect self-reflexively used to play up the performative aspect of social behavior. Instead of sounding like writerly back-patting, they constellate into rich profiles of the identities constantly being cultivated and negotiated by the film’s rudderless young adults. Baumbach’s commitment to sincerely evaluating their foibles, anxieties, and misgivings through shimmering comedy that neither trivializes nor glorifies is beguiling. It’s what makes Mistress America, in many ways thematically familiar but in others a mature expansion of familiar themes, a disarmingly valuable delight.