Fleet, insightful, funny ha Ha

I remember 27, more meaningful than 21 or 30. I remember somehow knowing it would be transformative, even if I did little to actively transform myself. “27 is old,” as someone asserts in Frances Ha, but it’s young too. Certain peers stop excusing you for certain shortcomings, but few will write you off completely if you don’t get your shit together. 27 is suspension, wariness, looming threats of something called maturity, and persistent opportunities for parties to be prolonged. Everything I just wrote is wildly subjective, but it’s a subjectivity shared with the fleet, utterly unimposing yet cumulatively insightful new comedy directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Baumbach and the film’s star, Greta Gerwig. The titular heroine of Frances Ha is 27, mostly adrift, clinging to sketchy, outdated dreams, and to an idea of friendship that seems set to expire any second.

Frances and Sophie (Mickey Sumner) are best friends and roommates living in Brooklyn. They share nearly everything, including, most nights, a bed. They are “like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore.” When in need of comfort, Frances asks Sophie to “tell me the story of us,” a ritual to maintain an adolescent fantasy image of the friends-as-power couple, conquering some corner of the world, Sophie’s being the publishing industry, Frances’ being the world of dance. About that: one of the elements I love about Frances Ha is how perfectly believable and preposterous it is that Frances wants to be a dancer. She can’t quite coordinate her body to do things like walk fluidly. She doesn’t look entirely comfortable, or grounded, while sitting in a chair or shadowing a guest at a party where she’s working as a server. In one scene she fumbles with a sandwich like she’s still learning to eat. Most of her movements seem involuntary: the way conversation with Sophie automatically prompts illustrative physical gestures even when they’re only speaking on the phone. Frances Ha is above all a character study, and Gerwig brings to just the right balance of self-effacing self-analysis and actor’s craft. Her character is adorable yet maddeningly passive. She’s makes you laugh, makes you crazy, breaks your heart if you’re in the unfortunate position of trying to be her boyfriend, or something. The film’s story, as such, is about Sophie moving in with her boyfriend and trying to grow up, and Frances missing Sophie wanting to follow her lead without having much of an idea as to how.

Baumbach has sculpted Frances Ha with a pretty irresistible sort of comic charisma. Much of the film is comprised of short, abrupt scenes, with hard cuts to sound and image, whose connections are not always obvious, just a line here, a gesture there, creating an inherently buoyant, clipped rhythm, as engagingly disjointed as Frances’ daily life. The photography is black and white, with a level of fuzziness that invokes present-tense nostalgia. Along with early Truffaut, Woody Allen is an obvious influence, not only in the silvery views of New York but in the patter, the urbane vernacular, the particular use of music over montage, and the title cards that state each address Frances inhabits, however briefly. Frances claims to have trouble leaving places, yet once her living situation with Sophie falls apart all she does is leave. She moves in with two dudes and their liquor trolley. She embarks on a Christmas visit to the folks in Sacramento, and takes an impulsive, poorly planned trip to Paris. For all her apparent inertia, Frances does indeed movie, perhaps most memorably in a sequence that finds her doing nothing more than skipping, dancing, scurrying down several Manhattan blocks to David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love.’ It’s a lovely scene of a young woman still capable of fleeing her own ample self-consciousness and giving in to the sheer propulsion of a given moment. Frances Ha is all about moments, this one and this one and this. And it has just enough of them to make us feel like we’ve really come to know some substantial, larger moment within a single life, a moment—27—that will surely transform the bearer of that life in a permanent, lasting way. 

        

Queasy, Cruel, Comic: Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding is a movie that, above all else, turns on the delicious discomforts of recognition. Recognition of self in family, family in self, and, just as importantly, the lack of any recognition altogether. Discomfort is of course rarely all that delicious in real life, but when sculpted into taut, tense, witty scenarios by writer/director Noah Baumbach, and embodied by the superlative casts he and Douglas Aibel assemble, it can frequently reach queasy, effervescent heights of comic wonder.

The movie begins with successful novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) wiggling through a corridor on a train leaving her comfort zone of New York City for some island near Long Island. That our titular heroine starts her story in a state of disequilibrium is made complete by the rather ingenious way in which she’s introduced to us: mistaking him for her own teenage son Claude (Zane Pais), she sits beside a complete stranger. Her failure to recognize the hapless, approval-seeking Claude speaks volumes about Margot’s difficulties with and resistance to motherhood, as it does about the sort of humour that Margot at the Wedding runs on. As with Baumbach’s break-out hit The Squid & the Whale, laughs escape from our recognizing the dynamics of dysfunctional families, if not, crucially for the sake of comic surprise, the particularities of the family in question, confirming Tolstoy’s famous line about how all unhappy families are different.

A defining factor in Baumbach’s dissection of family is his emphatic interest in giving his adults very adult stories and his kids stories focused around their eager ambition to penetrate the banal mysteries of adult life. Adults and kids intermingle without having to compromise the overall tone of the movie, which hums along, fuelled by need, injury and the distribution of emotional collateral. With child in tow, though conspicuously sans husband, Margot ostensibly arrives on the quiet island to attend and support the marriage of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to tubby, nervy ex-rocker Malcolm (Jack Black), who she met only recently. Once enveloped by the affluent, small community Margot and Claude are confronted with scenes of sexual and fraternal manipulation and expectation, and in these scenes their disparate age groups become irrelevant. Insecurity becomes an equal opportunity threat to all involved.

Squaring off against sea, shrubs, childhood mementos and a lonely, bare tree, under overcast east coast light rendered with muted beauty by ace cinematographer Harris Savides, Margot and Pauline’s interaction forms a consistent centre to this movie that handles story in the loosest terms it can get away with. Things don’t progress a whole lot in Margot at the Wedding, but the static nature of the drama is engagingly offset by how terrifically funny it all is –and its funny because we keep discovering more and more about how these wildly antagonistic sisters operate. And its hard to imagine this relationship playing as well as it does without one of the most inspired strokes of casting in recent memory.

Kidman and Leigh as sisters still strikes me as an utterly bizarre, unlikely choice, the former actor distinguished by her elegance, taste and understatement, the latter by her ballsy, go-for-broke, sometimes deeply mannered performances. My first thought was: this movie’s not big enough for the two of them. My second was: that’s goddamned brilliant! They’re both so good, so mutually attuned to Baumbach’s style while coming to it from very different sensibilities, that they dangle side by side from this family tree with inspired incongruity: Margot the privately grotesque star of the family, Pauline the more sympathetic, if hopelessly lost black sheep. And when you throw the added wild card of Black into the mix, playing a character that no one, his fiancée included, seems entirely comfortable with, you’ve pretty much sealed the deal as far as comic tension is concerned.

The cruelty that constitutes the stock in trade of Margot never really gets shaken off. Thankfully. But that Margot is such a compulsive bitch most of the time makes her role in the family all the more compelling to work through. Its not just this movie that needs Margot to function, her family needs her too, as a way to reflect back their own weaknesses and conflicted feelings with success as defined by the outside world. And, as jarring as the final gesture made in Margot at the Wedding is, it displays a remarkable flicker of optimism in this mostly nasty, mostly pleasingly shapeless world Baumbach’s created. Out of nowhere, the movie seems to be telling us that we never know when our deeper moral impulses might just leap out, yank us by the lapels, and force us to live up to something better than our conditions promise.