Mistress America (Noah Baumbach, 2015)

[Jeff]

Baumbach's second 2015 film, the "Untitled Public School Project" he wrote with Gerwig and shot on the sly in late 2012, will debut next month at Sundance.

The film, now titled Mistress America, stars Gerwig and Lola Kirke. Here's the logline:

Tracy, a lonely college freshman in New York, is rescued from her solitude by her soon-to-be stepsister Brooke, an adventurous gal about town who entangles her in alluringly mad schemes. Mistress America is a comedy about dream-chasing, score-settling, makeshift families, and cat-stealing.

[Jeff]

Fox Searchlight picked up Mistress America in advance of its Sundance debut.

It premiered tonight, and early reactions have been quite positive.

like Frances Ha on adderall, Baumbach goes the full Sturges for his lightest, funniest & most winning film.

N.Baumbach knocks another New York story out of the park this time w/manic, screwball rapidfire delivery & 80s music sheen

Mistress America is Noah Baumbach's funniest film. A small-scale, rapid-fire ode to finding one's footing. Incredible ensemble.

Noah Baumbach's MISTRESS AMERICA is a CLUELESS for relentless millennial ambition. A hysterical, wild companion to FRANCES HA.

MISTRESS AMERICA is totally delightful. Baumbach's funniest since KICKING. Wonderful nesting-doll performance from Gerwig.

Takes awhile but eventually ramps up to a dizzy, screwball mania. Bogdanovich is gonna love this one.

Felt labored to me for a long time, but takes off once it commits wholeheartedly to a screwball vibe.

MISTRESS AMERICA was the best thing I'd seen at #Sundance, then turned exasperating and too clever, ended up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mistress America is Baumbach's best collaboration, an advance on Frances Ha.

MISTRESS AMERICA: Lots to like, but it's such a concentrated dose of rapidfire clever Baumbach lines it becomes a little distancing.

Mistress America was snot inducing funny.

The Baumbach movie is the best movie of its kind since 1935! So good.

[hearthesilence]

The reaction at TIFF and its surprise NYFF screening last year was very positive. I have to admit, the trailer does leave for me the possibility that it's overhyped, but it does sound promising regardless.

[Jeff]

The reaction at TIFF and its surprise NYFF screening last year was very positive. I have to admit, the trailer does leave for me the possibility that it's overhyped, but it does sound promising regardless.

You are thinking of Baumbach's other 2015 film, While We're Young. This was the first screening of Mistress America.

[hearthesilence]

Ahhhhh, never mind, forgot he cranked two out.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Trailer

[mfunk9786]

I don't really know where to begin with what is going to sound much like hyperbole, but let me just say that I'm amazed by the idea that the same person who wrote and directed this year's disappointing and one-note While We're Young wrote and directed Mistress America. While We're Young is one of those sorts of New York films that makes you wish you'll never need to hear about the place or see it portrayed on screen again, while Mistress America is one of the finest coming of age films ever made, and one that has very little interest in romanticizing its setting, because it's too busy finding the romance in the beautiful flaws of its characters. This is Baumbach's best work, and it's absolutely thanks to his two leads. Greta Gerwig finds a perfect midpoint for the film's title character whom she could've easily played too broadly, too unlikable, or too sad - and what to say about Lola Kirke, who has an almost... do I want to say Karina on this forum?... quality to her easy screen presence here. There are moments of the film played like a broad stage comedy, but where it really shines is in Tracy's moments of quiet understanding and growth that could only come from knowing someone like Brooke and peeling back layers from her complicated new sister at a time when her own are still forming. The perfect 85 minute movie for anyone who's 18, or 30, to see and contemplate and cherish, and one of this year's very best.

[mfunk9786]

David Ehrlich's fantastic brief review in Time Out New York

Mistress America steamrolls through its mesmerizingly dense running time with such joyous violence that its themes only bubble up to the surface in retrospect, the heart of the movie identified like the dental records of a body that’s been burned beyond all recognition.
...
A giddy treatise against the need for outside validation, Mistress America nimbly vivisects how we define ourselves in an age when Twitter allows people to broadcast their achievements so widely that every cell phone doubles as an EKG machine for our self-worth. How great it is, then, to see that these women ultimately belong only to themselves.

[domino harvey]

Eh, this was okay. Better than Frances Ha at least, thank God. But it's not even the best Noah Baumbach movie released this year, much less ever. Once again, despite strong screen presence, Greta Gerwig appears to be messing with Baumbach's strengths and diluting them into a concoction not nearly as satisfying as Baumbach's solo work. Lola Kirke is no Anna Karina-- she's more of a Rashida Jones' little sister-- and this is a film that barely feels like a New York movie any different than all the others (other than Gerwig jammin' out with the Dirty Projectors, I guess). There's funny stray lines (but not enough for a Baumbach film-- any five minutes of While We're Young, inexplicably not beloved on the forum, produced funnier and more astutely observed moments than those found here) and the centerpiece farce at the t-shirt design thief's home is the only thing that really works here, probably because it abandons all attempts at emotional realism and just turns into a decent sitcom of compounding comic bulletpoints. I don't think the film earns its eventual attempt at an emotional finish, and I'm not super enamored with the rest to really work myself up over it besides.

[dreamdead]

This is enjoyable—it’s not on the same level as Andrew Bujalski’s Results, which dwelled on character interiority more closely while covering similar themes—but it’s got a fun rapport throughout. If anything, the film struggles to justify why strangers should judge an aspiring writer for trying to get her “subject” to experience success so that she (i.e. the writer) can have more material to draw on. The level of judgment cast against Kirke seems overblown when one considers the actual plot.

Otherwise, this is the kind of hangout film that’s interesting for the supporting work, where one-off characters like the downstairs apartment-goer or the pregnant Asian woman get just enough to do that they become entertaining in their own right. I suspect that Stillman’s Damsels in Distress is still more interesting fare that covers this terrain as well.

[mfunk9786]

I saw this again and feel vindicated in that I feel exactly the same about the film's merits, and some of my hyperbole (Lola Kirke is magnetic). The film's never cruel to any of its archetypes in a way that suggests that the filmmaker feels above them (which can't be said for something like While We're Young), and this film could have very easily been a pile-on judgment of Gerwig's character. Instead, it finds both the importance and the sadness in the sort of person who seems to exist just to inform and elevate the lives of the people around her, while never being able to nail down much of a definitive identity or path herself. It's a celebration of the reasonable idea that a young person spending time with flawed, interesting people is more beneficial to their development into a well-rounded, empathetic adult than spending that time with those to whom life comes easy, and that's an important and complicated lesson for a film to impart, particularly if it manages to be as entertaining as this one. The best of 2015 going into the fourth quarter prestige rush.

[knives]

I think I'll mostly stand by Dom for this one (though I think America's best moments beat While We're Young which was the sort of reliable Parks & Recs to this one's uneven by too far Community). The second half of this is mostly great like a rejiggering of Margot at the Wedding though weeded to Gerwig's giddy need to please (and let's face it she's the real auteur here). It's a fairly brilliant chamber room play of wrong headed compassion. The sense of triumph really isn't earned at any point and the big interrogation at the end is stupid though it fits the general tone making it a wash. Too bad it's glued onto the back end of everything wrong with Baumbach's previous two films. Gerwig proves herself to be her generation's greatest actress by virtue of her character not causing me to shut off the film before they get to the friend's house (at the same time it proves she should not be writing scripts). I get the point is she's supposed to be annoying, but the film shouldn't have worked so hard on it if it also wanted us to find her charming and likable. She's just a female Alfie and suffocates the film (it doesn't help that the main character is a non-entity who doesn't affect at all). For the first forty minutes or so there's nothing driving this themeless first half forward except a collection of dense quirks. It's just plain infuriating though it says a lot about the quality of the second half that I would still call the film good (I guess).

[Pepsi]

Is there some mystic reason why this film is quite hard to find on Blu-Ray (only US & Canada editions), and even on DVD.
Most of Baumbach films gets a decent distribution, and this one got mostly good reviews.

[kcota17]

It’s $8 on Amazon

[Ribs]

Pepsi meant why the film didn't get a release outside of the US/Canadian release.

[Pepsi]

It’s $8 on Amazon

Yes, I just bought it from there. But no UK BD or DVD, or European release as far as I know. Also the US BD is sold almost only at Amazon.

[therewillbeblus]

All these years later, this is still low-end Baumbach, but a revisit gave me two takeaways in polar opposite directions:

1) The bar confrontation between Gerwig and the girl she bullied back in high school is so much richer than the rest of the film, and completely in step with Baumbach’s keen perception of gray morality and naked imperfections. Both characters are so right and wrong, have terrible and good points, and it’s a wonderfully messy interaction. Yes, Gerwig’s solipsism that expects everyone to be where she’s at without apology is problematic, but her ethos that we should and can not be held accountable for how each individual processes their own emotions about us is a wonderful exhibition of one of our biggest day to day social issues: the resenter not taking responsibility for their own management of anger, and the expectation that everyone else should meet them where they’re at. A great scene of solipsism meeting solipsism- a unique portrayal of dialogue and yet an exchange as common as a drunk night out in Times Square. Seemingly a full-Baumbach contribution, right out of Margot at the Wedding or Greenberg, but an alien presence against the rest of what we get here

2) At the end of the climactic setpiece, Heather Lind’s character-breaking to deliver notes on the story starts off kinda funny, but it’s an incredibly-forced and ultimately unfunny homage-bordering-thievery to the best thing Philip Roth ever wrote (the passive aggressive letter from the rabbi’s wife containing notes on Zuckerman’s short story in The Ghost Writer). It just misses the intended tone by a mile, and it’s clear that Baumbach reeeeaaaallly wanted to put this idea in. The comedic reaching is a bit embarrassing, bluntly drawing nonexistent connective tissue between the story and women’s rights groups, while aping the “Would Goebbels approve?” line that’s directly related to the material of dissonant opinions on the responsibility of the Jewish writer across generations in Roth’s story. Clearly another solo Baumbach contribution to the script too, but also evidence that he does so much better when just speaking from the heart and tapping into his perceptive human experience, rather than copying influences or cramming in self-serving ideas because they make him feel smart. The meta in-joke that he’s baldly doing what his lead is evading criticism for isn’t lost on me, it just doesn’t gel