Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang
Slowly but steadily, Greta Gerwig
has been crafting wry and thoughtful portraits of today’s self-absorbed
millennials ... and, more specifically, those who suffer from what has been
branded Failure to Launch.
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| Mourning the apparent loss of her long-time best friend, Frances (Greta Gerwig) drowns her sorrows in a good meal with Lev (Adam Driver), a sympathetic guy-pal who offers the sort of superficial warmth that can obscure emotional pain ... if only briefly. What Frances hasn't yet learned, though, is that true healing must come from within. |
We’ve seen hints in her stand-out
supporting roles in the remake of Arthur
and Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love.
Despite having (I assume) minimal creative control over those projects, and
being limited to what those directors and scripts allowed, Gerwig nonetheless
delivered an irresistible blend of quirky charm and wary vulnerability. The
classic Greta Gerwig character — assuming it’s not too early to brand her in
such a manner — always seems slightly out of phase with our world, her
expression of cautious bewilderment suggesting that, to her, society and
interpersonal relationships always are mildly out of focus.
Gerwig delivered a richer example
of such a young woman in last year’s Lola Versus, but her often amiable performance was undone by a frequently cruel
and tin-eared script that forced too much self-destructive behavior on a title
character who clearly should have known better.
Cue the arrival of Frances Ha, a much more satisfying
character study of a wayward New Yorker who — despite good intentions and often
painful sincerity — just can’t get her act together. Gerwig had a strong hand
in this 27-year-old woman’s development, having shared scripting credit with
director Noah Baumbach. (They also worked together on 2010’s unsatisfying Greenberg.) The result feels far more
credibly authentic than the erratic nitwit in Lola Versus.
Frances is the sort of forever
flustered individual who will promise to do something, and then let the
opportunity slip by; or will insist that she won’t do something, but then will. She’s simultaneously endearing
and deeply frustrating, and numerous scenes in this film are uncomfortable and
unsettling, as we worry over whether she’ll miss another promising opportunity,
or yield to another impetuous, ill-advised decision.
She’s tone-deaf during social
occasions, forever saying the wrong thing to the wrong people: not because
she’s cruel or thoughtless, but mostly because she simply doesn’t pay attention
to relationship cues, whether casual or formal. She’s much too self-absorbed:
but, again, not in an unpleasant manner. She’s just ... well ... unfinished, somehow. And helpless to do
anything about it.
But Gerwig’s performance is so
endearing, and so genuinely sweet, that we can’t help forgiving Frances her
many shortcomings (even as we groan over them). Watching her flail during an
effort to describe wanting that “magic moment” between two soul mates — when
eyes lock from opposite ends of a room, and a quick smile of acknowledgment cements
the sort of bond that neither time nor God could disrupt — is poetry in motion.
It’s a breathtaking, all-in scene: utterly mesmerizing, for Gerwig’s intensity.
Watch how she works every square millimeter of her expressive face, from lips
and chin to eyebrows.
