Noah Baumbach's latest, Mistress America, has been hailed as a 21st century screwball comedy. Well, not quite.
The story is told by Tracy (Lola Kirke) who has just begun her freshman year at Barnard College in New York. Her experience so far is dismal. Students and teachers speak in self-serving quips because they can’t get outside themselves. When Tracy tells a counselor that she has trouble getting going, the self-absorbed advisor only suggests she try harder to be on time.
Tracy hopes to write a story for the campus literary magazine, called “Mobius,” as in Mobius Strip, but that clique is too snobbish to welcome a young outsider. Tracy eats alone in the cafeteria.
The population of Mistress America tends to be depressed and cynical, but just enough to be chic and clever. It’s a timid film, and what it puts out as incisive wit and social commentary for the most part is a string of easy jibes. The familiarity gives a comfortable chuckle, but the movie doesn’t excite either the nervous system, the brain or the gut.
A character pronounces the cliché that television is the new novel, as if it were news. Mistress America has been getting credit for sarcasm and satire – but lines like this one or a snooty put down about buying cashmere at Old Navy get nowhere near satire.
The story gets a boost when lonely Tracy meets Brooke (Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the film with director Noah Baumbach). Tracy’s mother is about to marry Brooke’s father, so the two get together, and for much of the film 30-ish Brooke takes 18-year-old Tracy on something like a tour of their society.
It’s a limited tour. The young people are pretty much the same by way of social rank, skin color, attitudes and ambitions. They talk past each other. Gerwig’s Brooke leads the group, but not to any place in particular. She’s pursuing a hapless business idea for a restaurant in Brooklyn combined with laser hair removal. The film’s main catastrophe comes when her backer and former boyfriend backs out of the deal.
Mistress America has been compared to the screwball comedies of the 1930s because the characters are ditzy and scatter-brained. It’s a lame comparison. Beneath their crazy surfaces those films are loaded with attitude about who runs the world, and how they do it.
Characters in screwball comedy are not just incidentally nutty; their loony behavior takes the film somewhere. Screwball comedy is a phenomenon of The Great Depression, when filmmakers, among others, blamed a kind of cold male rationality for the collapse of the economy. In the films, it becomes the job of women and socially powerless men to break down that rigid thinking with free association, anti-rationality and all sorts of manic carrying on.
In Mistress America, Brooke just can’t put together two consecutive sentences on the same subject. Her lunacy has no power; she doesn’t change any one or any thing; she simply makes comments that are slightly clever.
Good screwball comedy doesn’t stop with a one liner – the jokes lead you on for the entire movie.
Mistress America lacks reach. Woody Allen also confines his films – especially the good ones – to one thin slice of life in New York. You can see yourself in Allen’s self-absorbed characters, but Baumbach and Gerwig’s are too thin.
In 1976, Saul Steinberg did a famous map of the world for the cover of The New Yorker magazine. It showed mostly the New York avenues, then the Hudson River, a slice of Jersey, a bit of America, then the Pacific Ocean and a tiny sliver of China, Japan and Russia. He was being ironic – about the provincial world view of many New Yorkers.
Noah Baumbach and Mistress America can’t see even that far. Calling the movie Mistress America is a stretch.
