For ‘Mistress America,’ Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig
Serve Screwball With a Whiff of Menace
By : M.Adel
Both of Noah
Baumbach’s parents reviewed movies when he was growing up in Brooklyn — his
father, Jonathan Baumbach, for Partisan Review, and his mother, Georgia Brown,
for The Village Voice. So it may not be a surprise that Mr. Baumbach, 45,
became a writer-director whose films often pay homage to screen influences like
Woody Allen and Hal Ashby.
Greta Gerwig,
Mr. Baumbach’s co-writer and his on- and off-screen muse, was not exposed to
such a wide array of films during her childhood in Sacramento. There was a
Blockbuster and other video stores, “but they didn’t have a lot of breadth,”
said Ms. Gerwig, 32. “It wasn’t until I got to college at Barnard that I became
interested in seeing older movies at Film Forum and the Museum of the Moving
Image. Kim’s Video in the East Village organized the films by directors, and
that was also a big shift for me.”
In line with
their shared enthusiasms, Mr. Baumbach and Ms. Gerwig’s new film, “Mistress
America,” melds two genres from earlier eras: the fast-talking screwball farces
of the 1930s and 1940s and the odd-couple comedies of the 1980s.
Ms. Gerwig
stars as Brooke, a madcap New Yorker who takes her soon-to-be stepsister, the
seemingly naïve but secretly calculating college freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke),
on a manic misadventure. With a growing entourage, their journey culminates
inside a glass house in Greenwich, Conn., where Brooke tries to persuade her
wealthy ex-boyfriend (Michael Chernus), who is married to her former best
friend, to invest in her crackpot scheme for a home-cooking restaurant/hair
salon/art gallery that she imagines will be her ticket out of the rat race.
“We talked about the idea of a more straight-edged,
square character getting sucked into an underworld by a dangerous woman,” Ms.
Gerwig said. “These kinds of women seem to have disappeared from movies.
They’re not safe in any way. I just found myself inspired by them and feeling
like I hadn’t seen them in a long time.”
In a recent
sit-down at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo, the couple ticked off a list of
the films that resonated most for them in making “Mistress America” and
discussed them with glee, frequently finishing each other’s thoughts. “The best
thing is talking about other people’s movies,” Mr. Baumbach said. Ms. Gerwig
added, “It’s so much easier than talking about your own.”
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