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Posted by on Jun 3, 2013 in Featured, Movies, Pop Culture, Ted McLoof | 0 comments

Frances Ha Review: The Greta Escape

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There’s an episode of The Larry Sanders Show when Larry gets sick, and Hank, Larry’s normally vulnerable and likable sidekick, gets a chance to host the show. When Hank first gets to be in the spotlight, people still like him: he can’t believe he’s center stage, and has that “Who, me?” quality about him that endeared him to the audience in the first place. Overnight, though, it goes straight to his head, and he starts demanding changes to the show, and gets way too confident and not a little cocky—and as a result, he gets booed off the stage. The show’s producer sits him down at the end of the episode with this advice: “What have we learned here? When you’re vulnerable, people like you. When you act like an asshole, people think you’re an asshole.”

That piece of advice keeps ringing in your head as you watch Frances Ha, because you want to walk through the screen and tell it to Greta Gerwig—not her character Frances, but Gerwig herself. Greta Gerwig starred in a handful of mumblecore films before being noticed in a big way by Noah Baumbach, writer/director of the near-flawless The Squid and the Whale, the indispensable Kicking and Screaming, and the shrewd Ben Stiller-vehicle Greenberg, also starring Gerwig. Greenberg was her first real role, and catapulted her onto the radar of the likes of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman. And you can see why: Gerwig’s performance in Greenberg (residual from her mumblecore days) is painfully real and awkward; she stumbles through her relationship with Stiller’s cold character, never knows what to do with her hands, barely ever makes eye contact with anyone, re-states her sentences three or four times before she gets the wording right. There are moments in the film when you’d swear this was not an actress but a woman walking down the street who accidentally wandered onto a movie set, and then is totally caught off-guard by the fact that there are cameras around. And this quality works for her, and for the character: you want to hug her and let her know she deserves better, but you’re left to squirm as a helpless member of the audience.

Not so in Frances Ha, also directed by Baumbach but co-written and starring Gerwig as the titular Frances, a 27-year-old ballet dancer living in New York. Baumbach and Gerwig are, in real life, dating now, and while hat information shouldn’t matter, you can’t help but wonder whether their relationship is the reason Baumbach seems to let Gerwig run the show here. It’s tough going at first. Frances lives with her bestest ever friend in the whole wide world, Sophie, and we watch a handful of scenes with them together, play-fighting and dancing in the street and just generally being quirky-with-a-capital-Q. They say things like “Tell me the story of Us again” just before bed, and “I have a crush on a boy, but his name is Georgie,” and “I don’t think he’s an alcoholic, but sometimes he would have like twelve beers,” and “I feel like a bad mother in 1987.” They are, in other words, very immature, unable to hold on to meaningful romantic relationships (they keep calling each other “undateable”) because they’re too in love with having fun together.

These opening scenes are so plotless and seemingly without narrative arc whatsoever that you start to get the feeling Baumbach is not telling a story as much as he’s creating a mood piece, especially considering his artsy edits and black-and-white photography (thank God I saw this with my cinephile friend Ben, who mere weeks before had lent me three Truffaut films, so that I could actually recognize the pastiche; otherwise I would have just thought Baumbach had lost his mind). There isn’t a lot of judgment going around about these characters, I guess is what I’m saying, and so for about twenty minutes you think you’re supposed to take their immaturity at face-value, to think they’re cool, to want to use Brooklyn as your own private playground, too, and spend your whole life with your college roommate.

Mercifully, that doesn’t end up being the case. Sophie finds a better apartment and gets serious about her boyfriend, and Frances finds herself on her own. This is where Frances Ha does its best work, I think, in this middle stretch (I’d call it the second act, but the movie meanders so much that it feels odd to suggest it has anything like a three-act structure). Here’s where we realize what this movie is really about: that point in your late twenties when you realize you have to be a grown-up, when job-hopping and crashing on people’s couches and drinking until 4 AM is no longer bohemian but actually kind of sad. “Aren’t you older than Sophie?” a character asks Frances. “Two months, not much.” “Oh,” she says. “You seem older. Like, a lot older. I mean, she seems more grown up, but you seem older.” This line of dialogue is clearly Baumbach’s contribution, because it carries with it his expert and precise brand of cutting remarks. Frances is taken aback by the comment, and doesn’t recover for the remaining hour of the film—but even better, it outlines the conundrum of her age, that time in your life when you want people to think that you’re neither older nor younger than you actually are.

It probably shows that I’m pretty close to Frances’ age (29), and so I responded to this stuff pretty strongly. I have no idea how it might play to someone who’s in their forties, or to teenagers, but for anyone between like 25 and 35, I think it gets the tone just right. And this conflict is also where Gerwig the actress is used best, because Frances starts to seriously doubt herself, and feels left out when she goes (singly) to dinners with partnered-up people, and flies to Paris for 36 hours on a credit card she got in the mail, basically because there’s nothing else to do (it’s a nice and painful moment when she realizes there’s nothing to do in Paris, either). The end cheats a bit, and feels wholly unearned, and really just kind of happens. But then again I don’t know if I was drawn to Frances’ conflict as a story as much as I was drawn to it as a fact, so maybe I just didn’t feel it needed a resolution. That said, the ending shot, which explains the film’s title, is a great little wink, a suggestion that Frances “has her shit together” finally, albeit not without giving up a piece of herself and fitting her life into a little box.

The film, ultimately, is split in two: the Baumbach parts and the Gerwig parts. The Baumbach parts are easy to spot (like the nods to Salinger, as in Frances’ Zooey-like retreat to the bathtub during her breakdown at her parents’ place), and are way more interesting. Maybe that’s because they’re the parts where Gerwig has to be vulnerable, which is what we want, rather than quirkily pirouetting town Fifth Avenue to the tune of Bowie’s “Modern Romance”—which just makes her look like an asshole.

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