Five years into Noah Baumbach’s film career, he had worked with four actors three times each. His go-to performers Carlos Jacott, Chris Eigeman, John Lehr, and Eric Stoltz formed perhaps the least-heralded indie-movie rep company of the ’90s, nailing the conversational quipping of Baumbach’s dialogue in movies like Kicking And Screaming and Mr. Jealousy. Their third film together, though, was Highball, an obscurity even by these standards, for which Baumbach assumed aliases in lieu of writing or directing credits. Highball, shot with time and money left over from Mr. Jealousy, is absolutely hilarious; it’s also lo-fi, strange, and, according to Baumbach, essentially an unfinished experiment. So it’s disappointing but not surprising that it led to a hard reset of Baumbach’s career. When he returned eight years later with The Squid And The Whale, no one from the old gang accompanied him.
Squid is sort of a comedy, too, as is the even more caustic Margot At The Wedding, and Baumbach’s signature wit remains. But these are raw, wounding comedies of dysfunctional families and personalities, shot with handheld intimacy—not his charming early comedies. No one familiar with Baumbach 2.0 would be surprised by the bleak discomfort of Greenberg, in which Ben Stiller plays the titular character, an unemployed, possibly unemployable neurotic with a short fuse, prone to revise phrases like “youth is wasted on the young” to “life is wasted on people.” The character is a great match for Stiller, who often plays short-fused neurotics but rarely as well-drawn (or averse to corralling magical museum exhibits) as Roger Greenberg.
Stiller would make a natural De Niro to Baumbach’s nonviolent Scorsese, and that partnership has indeed continued with While We’re Young and Baumbach’s forthcoming next project. But a small streak of sunshine broke through the overcast Greenberg in the form of Greta Gerwig. “Small” should not indicate that Gerwig is less than prominent or less than terrific in the role of Florence, an assistant for Greenberg’s brother who takes a semi-inexplicable shine to the malcontent attempting to build a doghouse and/or “do nothing” while his brother and family are out of town. It’s just that she can only bring so much brightness into Greenberg’s worldview—and, for that matter, her own, which seems colored by her doormat tendencies.
At the time of Greenberg’s 2010 release, Gerwig had appeared almost exclusively in microbudget features about twentysomethings stumbling and mumbling their way through postgraduate malaise. This group of movies by filmmakers like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers, dubbed “mumblecore” somewhat against their will, arguably functions as a well-stocked if-you-liked-that-try-this shelf for Kicking And Screaming fans. In these films, Gerwig often looks and sounds wobbly, reticent—she’s a gawky charmer, and so are many of the movies. Greenberg’s Florence lives in somewhat less of a bubble than a lot of mumblecore characters in that she is more or less gainfully employed and interacts with people older than herself.
Baumbach, working with the late cinematographer Harris Savides, shoots Gerwig with a kind of watchful affection, getting in close as she drives around doing work errands, a hazy Los Angeles sun hitting the windows and Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” playing. “Are you going to let me in?” she asks another driver in talking-to-herself tones. This is one of the first shots of the movie, which follows Florence for a full eight minutes before introducing Stiller’s title character. In retrospect, it seems like Baumbach is tipping his hand about his interest in Gerwig. His instincts are dead-on; putting Gerwig at the front of the movie allows a hesitant character to make a vivid impression before smashing her into Stiller’s prickly garden of hang-ups and neuroses. Their romantic scrabbling, including a profoundly unsexy sort of sex scene, maintains the uncertainty of mumblecore but with a more articulate form of mumbling.
Frances Ha feels even more inspired by mumblecore, at least superficially; it has just as much in common with French New Wave and Baumbach’s own Kicking And Screaming. But it isolates another aspect of the Gerwig mumblecore persona: the postcollege struggle to find both an outlet for creativity and a workable livelihood. In doing so, it strips away the mumblecore go-to of romantic complications, or at least traditional ones. Frances Ha does have romance—between Frances and her supposed best friend (Mickey Sumner), between Frances and New York City, between Frances and any number of new friends she deems “magic”—but it lacks sex or even kissing, at least on screen, between Frances and anyone else. As her address changes over the course of a year or so, Frances struggles to take root, and her fuckups never feel like an affectation. It’s a star turn from Gerwig that feels deeply personal, in part because she co-wrote the movie with Baumbach after Greenberg (and somewhere around then became his romantic partner in real life).
Gerwig is clearly attracted to a certain type of material. Her earlier movies—from her mumblecore days to her indie sort-of-rom-com Lola Versus to her love-interest gig as a whimsical New Yorker in the Arthur remake—all dance around what she finally nails perfectly as Frances, maybe because of her increased role behind the scenes. Her screenplay with Baumbach revisits the naturalistic quips of Kicking And Screaming and caffeinates them. Baumbach has always had a penchant for half-heard conversations (Kicking opens with a series of fragments at a graduation party; Highball is practically that scene at feature length), and in Frances, he accelerates his editing, with cuts serving as punchlines. Gerwig has screwball energy, but she’s distinctly contemporary, without imitation-Katharine-Hepburn rat-a-tat rhythms. Baumbach’s editing becomes her unseen screen partner, speeding up her lines by cutting some of them off. (Greenberg has some similar cutting but more often to jump past unnecessary exposition, as when he interrupts a phone call about a sick dog to get to the vet’s office.)
Gerwig’s performance doesn’t only come through in well-cut dialogue scenes. A lot of it qualifies as soloing, both spoken and not. In perhaps the most famous image from Frances, she dance-runs through the streets of Manhattan with David Bowie’s “Modern Love” playing on the soundtrack. Both the action and the song play as homage to a Leos Carax film, but it’s worth noting what comes before and after this sequence. The beat of the Bowie song starts in the previous scene, where Frances is about to make the decision to move in with a couple of friendly hipsters she’s just met, punctuating a little dance she does to say goodbye to them at the end of the night. The song is then abruptly cut off with a shot of her entering the Chinatown apartment and smiling to herself. It’s essentially the entire story of Frances’ move, temporary exhilaration and contentment told through Gerwig’s physical performance and Baumbach’s filmmaking.