Noah Baumbach’s new film, “Mistress America,” which he and Greta Gerwig co-wrote, is a masterwork of entrepreneurial cinema. One of its two protagonists is an energetic, fanciful New York woman of thirty, Brooke Cardinas (Gerwig), who dreams of starting a business—a restaurant-café that would be a hangout, a family place, a permanent shifting salon for artists and other cool people. Like a movie, Brooke’s restaurant (which she’ll call Mom’s) depends on obtaining the financing—and, like the sort of artistically ambitious independent movies that Baumbach makes, Mom’s will have to be funded less as a pure and cold business investment than as a work of love based on personal confidence in Brooke, and with an eye toward the virtues of the artisanal in a landscape filled with the mercantile.
“Mistress America” is also a masterwork of literary cinema. The film’s other protagonist, Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke), is an eighteen-year-old freshman at Barnard who wants to be a fiction writer. Tracy is having trouble fitting in at school. Nearly friendless, at odds with her roommate’s sophisticated anomie, and uninspired by her classes, Tracy calls a stranger for company: the thirty-year-old Brooke, her future stepsister. (Tracy’s mother will soon be marrying Brooke’s father.) Soon thereafter, Tracy writes a story à clef about Brooke and her effort to start a restaurant, but then, wanting to maintain and strengthen their new sisterly relationship, conceals the story from her.
Yet “Mistress America” is a masterwork of literary cinema in the other, qualitative sense: it isn’t merely about literature; it’s a work of brilliant writing, one of the most exquisite of recent screenplays. While watching the film, I wanted to transcribe the dialogue in real time for the pleasure of reading it afterward (and I hope that the screenplay, which Gerwig and Baumbach co-wrote, will be published as a book). The center of its writerly wonder is Brooke’s wild verbal whimsy.
As soon as Tracy lays eyes on Brooke, who sashays down the red staircase at the TKTS stand in Duffy Square with a wild shriek (“Tracy! Welcome to the Great White Way!”) and a theatrically ironic eye roll (almost a whole head roll), Tracy recognizes that Brooke is a character, in both senses of the word—an idiosyncratic, overflowing, even overwhelming personality, and someone made to be represented in a work of fiction. The next day, Tracy, back in her dorm room after a night of adventures with Brooke, writes a story, “Mistress America,” about a woman named Meadow who says and does what Brooke said and did when they were together. (That title refers to a TV series that Brooke comes up with, about a woman who’s a “government worker by day and a superhero by night.”)
A brilliant talker and aphorist, a fast-walking, fast-talking fount of gossip and insights, cutting wit and grandiose dreams, wild impulses and crazy projects, incisive observations and boundless audacity, Brooke seems like an ingenious invention herself. Gerwig and Baumbach collaborated on the script of their prior film together, “Frances Ha,” but there the protagonist more clearly mapped onto Gerwig’s own artistic ambitions, and the personal connection was inhibiting. Brooke’s relative distance from Gerwig has liberated her imagination, and the framework within which the filmmakers bring to life the character—who is delivered to the story through Tracy’s perspective—is amazingly fertile for literary invention.
Baumbach and Gerwig scatter a remarkable handful of seemingly random yet inspired and significant elements throughout the story. The apparent arbitrariness of incidents, pulled into the story’s gravitational field, makes its tight social circles seem populous, wondrous, and vast. “Mistress America” is inhabited by characters who, moving through the two women’s orbits, gain enormous vividness from their crossing light. These characters include two other students, Tony (Matthew Shear), to whom Lola is attracted, and Nicolette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), Tony’s possessive and jealous girlfriend; Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), Brooke’s “ex-friend” and “nemesis,” who is married to Brooke’s wealthy ex-boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus); a high-school acquaintance of Brooke’s (Rebecca Henderson); her neighbor in a building that is zoned, significantly, as commercial (Kareem Williams); two suburbanites (Dean Wareham and Cindy Cheung); and a student editor (played by Colin Stokes, of The New Yorker’s editorial staff—though he wasn’t at the time of filming). All of these characters, even those off-screen who are only heard (such as Brooke’s father) or who are not even heard (Brooke’s boyfriend, Stavros), acquire an extraordinary density, their dialogue gaining spin and lilt, from their place in the action.
The intersection of direction, performance, and writing achieves what James Ponsoldt, for instance, failed to do in “The End of the Tour”: the setting of the text. If there’s any throttle to the enthusiasm for Baumbach’s oeuvre, it arises from the sense that he devotes more attention and achieves more originality in the writing than in the filming. In “Mistress America,” filmed on the fly with a reduced crew, that sense is dispelled. He seems directorially energized, letting the melody of the language carry the drama. The staging, the framing, and the editing give the text an onscreen amplitude, a word that fills the world. Baumbach fills his cast with actors who are deft talkers, starting with Gerwig, whose mercurial delivery of the dialogue should be no surprise after her performance in Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress,” which channels Katharine Hepburn’s linguistic acrobatics. Kirke, a bit more stolid in demeanor, is inspired by Gerwig (or, rather, Tracy is inspired by Brooke) to challenge her aphorism for aphorism, comeback for comeback, in tempo as well as in acerbity.
The spring-loaded plot is itself a mirror on making movies—the desperate and immediate search for money. Brooke’s project hits a rough patch: as a result of her own fun-loving recklessness, she loses the funding for the restaurant and needs to find tens of thousands of dollars over the weekend in order to save the restaurant deal and prevent herself from being sued by contractors. Tracy, who has quickly become Brooke’s sounding board and supporter, decides to take matters into her own hands, and accompanies her on a road trip to Greenwich, Connecticut, with Tony and Nicolette, to hit up Mamie-Claire and Dylan for the money.
The portrait of Brooke is an ingenious and depressing refraction of the life of an actor. She’s a character, someone who’s self-aware regarding her energy, her idiosyncrasy, her desperate need for attention, and her need to be perceived as herself—“herself” being her first and most important creation. (What, after all, is an actor but a character in search of characters?) Brooke risks expending her whole creative force on the projection of her own personality. Brooke is a character—and Tracy is an author in search of a character. The younger woman is a literary dreamer and hustler in search of experience—and the experience that she finds is someone else’s.
Though “Mistress America” succeeds where “The End of the Tour” fails, it is nonetheless surprisingly cognate both with that film and with one of the other best films of the year so far, Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck,” which was written by its star, Amy Schumer. All three films are about characters whose crucial relationship involves writing about that crucial other person in their lives, and, in the process, risking that relationship. Baumbach’s film also meshes with Alex Ross Perry’s film “Listen Up Philip” in its borrowings from Philip Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer,” which is both a movie about a younger writer’s inspiration by an older one and about the perils of writing from life. (Though Perry’s film was released last year, it was filmed a few months after “Mistress America,” the shoot of which is described in Ian Parker’s Profile of Baumbach, from the April 29, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.)
The guiding spirit of these amanuensis-inspired films is Henry James, through his notion of the “central consciousness” and his theme of the realization and development of inhibited or stunted characters through their experience and observation of others whose qualities they admire.
For Baumbach and Apatow, the substance of the movie mirrors their production: in effect, both directors have become the central cinematic consciousnesses for filming the performances and the scripts of prodigious younger writers and actors, Gerwig and Schumer. In Ponsoldt’s case—where the material he’s filming, based on David Lipsky’s book of discussions with David Foster Wallace, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”—he faces the same Faustian risk that Lipsky himself did: that of becoming a modern-day Eckermann, an artist whose name lives on as the enabler and amanuensis of a greater writer, for merging his voice with and submerging his voice within the voice of that other writer.
The spate of amanuensis films suggests a vision of narrowing prospects and heightened fears—the sense that the wild and turbulent lives that filmmakers tended to live in the classic era (whether the rowdy exploits of Howard Hawks or Roberto Rossellini or Michelangelo Antonioni or Charlie Chaplin or Orson Welles, or the high-stakes, behind-the-scenes conflicts and torments of Alfred Hitchcock) are done. The classic studio era, for all the artistic constraints that it imposed on directors, also gave the high walls behind which to live wildly (and the considerable means with which to do so). Today, directing, in an age of independent filmmaking, is also an art of self-sustenance, of economy and measure, of the inevitably managerial—and these practical constraints extend to directors' personal lives as well. (Joe Swanberg’s “Digging for Fire,” with its pile of receipts to file, and Andrew Bujalski’s “Results,” about romance and finance behind the scenes of a gym, dramatize these anxieties as well.)
“Mistress America,” like these other amanuensis films, is about self-preservation, creation over the long haul, making a career, finding a place in the world, making a living. Great ideas aren’t enough; one has to be able to realize them, to create an infrastructure—one that is as much based on personal relationships prudently managed as it is rooted in forethought. The days of wild nights have their sell-by date invisibly built in, which is why one had better sell them quickly for as much as one can.
It remains to be seen whether Tracy will find a literary voice of her own to rival the one that she has borrowed from Brooke, or whether her greatest inspiration is to have noticed Brooke’s own magnificently overflowing personality and to have captured it. Will Tracy become a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer? (It’s noteworthy that the film that Baumbach made next, “While We’re Young,” is set among documentary filmmakers.)
The amanuensis movie or novel (for that’s what “The Ghost Writer” and, in its way, “Listen Up Philip” are, too) is, for the most part, the aspirational reaching up of the younger writer to the older, the younger writers pulling themselves up by the older writers’ bootstraps. (Not “Trainwreck,” though.) When making “Mistress America,” Baumbach put himself in the situation of Tracy, but as an older man, a mid-career filmmaker whose source of creative astonishment is a younger artist. That’s a different story altogether; it’s also the one that he addressed in “While We’re Young.”
