Friday, February 5, 2016

The 50 best films of 2015 / Mistress America / No 10

The 50 best films of 2015

in the US

No 10

Mistress America

Continuing our countdown of the best movies released in the US this year, we remember Noah Baumbach’s zippy screwball comedy about female friendship

Benjamin Lee
Monday 7 December 2015 12.38 GMT

One of the many recurring themes in Noah Baumbach’s work is the often dangerous discrepancy between how people want to be perceived and the reality of who they really are. In The Squid and the Whale, Jeff Daniels saw himself as a revered academic but he was a petty braggart. In Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman saw herself as a writer to be admired but she was a sociopath to be pitied. In While We’re Young, Baumbach’s other film of 2015, Ben Stiller saw himself as a documentarian with morals but he was an impetuous manchild with a Peter Pan complex.

In Mistress America, this gap has arguably never been wider. Greta Gerwig’s monstrous comic creation Brooke lives the flashy life she wants others to think she leads while hiding the truth of who she really is - a failed ex-bully with no friends. She’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with the Urban Outfitters-purchased curtain pulled back. Tirelessly self-promoting a carefully manufactured notion of herself via social media, she’s also quite possibly the most 2015 character of the year. But, like the people she hopes to convince, we are fooled, albeit temporarily.

We meet Brooke via her naive yet cocksure soon-to-be stepsister Tracy, played by Gone Girl’s Lola Kirke, and there’s something undeniably intoxicating about the life she leads and the confidence with which she lives it. Unlike Woody Allen, who Baumbach admits being obsessed with in college, he has the maturity and foresight to understand that as a 46-year-old man, he’s probably not the authority on writing women aged 18 and 30. Enlisting Gerwig on script duties, with whom he also co-wrote 2012’s Frances Ha, she helps to bring a vibrancy and an authenticity to the dialogue, of which there is so so much.

The zippy screwball pace and the escalating farce that arises would have been an impossible juggling act for less confident writers and performers but it’s remarkable how Baumbach and Gerwig constantly avoid sitcom trappings. Not one moment feels false even when the odds are stacked and the script enters darker territory.

But what’s most notable about Mistress America is that it’s firstly a story about female friendship and, mark this down, one that isn’t solely fixated on discussing male love interests. These are flawed, ambitious, Bechdel-approved women who have more important things to prioritise. In 2015, that shouldn’t be an exception but Baumbach and Gerwig show that it’s both effortlessly possible and hugely satisfying.

THE GUARDIAN