Noah Baumbach is a talented enough filmmaker to have built a fairly large contingent of loyal fans. He also has a pretty large group of detractors though, and that’s because the characters in his movies are often described as being selfish, morose, or flat out obnoxious. The dividing line between people who like his films and people who don’t, or perhaps whether one of his particular films works for you or doesn’t, seems to be whether or not you can find a inroad into experiencing some sympathy or at least a little understanding for his protagonists. If you can manage to put yourself in their shoes or latch on to one aspect of their personalities, then you can have a pretty illuminating experience with a Baumbach movie (my reaction to The Squid and the Whale), but if you can’t find anyway to relate to them at all, then chances are you’ll walk away from one of his films feeling completely alienated (my reaction to Margot at the Wedding).
The good news is, his new film, Frances Ha, features the most likable, easily relatable protagonist who’s appeared in a Baumbach movie to date, so it shouldn’t be too hard for most people to fall in love with it. At the start of the story our protagonist, an aspiring dancer named Frances (Greta Gerwig), is living with her best friend, a professional who works for a publishing company named Sophie (Mickey Sumner). They’re such good friends that they’re basically the same person, and everything in their home and in their lives is completely copacetic. There is one difference between them though: while Frances is a bit messy and a dreamer, Sophie is more organized and has a clear life plan. It’s this difference that ends up taking their lives in different directions and leads to them moving into different apartments in different neighborhoods. This is the inciting incident. From that point on, Frances Ha becomes a movie about finding your way in life, which is a theme that’s particularly suited to resonating with people in their 20s, but is universal enough that we can all relate. The moral here is that, for the first time ever, Noah Baumbach has made a real crowd pleaser.
Frances Ha is shot in black and white, which not only gives it a throwback beauty, but also works to visually and immediately separate it from every other indie drama about confused people in their 20s that you see in a given year. Watching Frances navigate the streets of Brooklyn and China Town in black and white can’t help but make one think about Woody Allen’s Manhattan as well, and how this film works on one level as something of an update of that one, documenting the lives of a new generation of privileged, educated young people, but from the perspective of a different borough. The other thing you notice right away about Frances Ha is that it’s funny. It doesn’t really contain many gags, or even many quips, but it beautifully recreates the experience of having friends who are smart and funny—which allows even the most mundane of conversations to be laced with insight and humor. Just watching these people sitting around, smoking and making small talk is as entertaining as anything else you’re going to see at the movies.
You can’t really talk about this movie without talking about Greta Gerwig, because if you dig deep down in the marrow of its bones what you’re going to find is Greta Gerwig. She’s not only playing the main character, who appears in every scene, but she also co-wrote the film with Baumbach, and the influence she had in altering the tone of his usual work is readily apparent. Gerwig has a natural warmth and openness to her, and that sensibility permeates every aspect of this film. As a performer she’s quite charming, but it isn’t necessarily her charm that’s the secret to her success, it’s the way her open-wound vulnerability allows you to sympathize with her and relate to her even while she’s charming you. There’s an honesty to what she does, even as she suckers you in by being cutesy. Her performance here, as well as her work in last year’s Damsels in Distress, more than proves that she’s a vital lead actress who has no trouble anchoring a film. It will be interesting to see if any of the more mainstream filmmakers notice this and try to utilize her talents in the coming years.
Her presence as the lead is the most visible asset that Gerwig lends Frances Ha, but the most substantial is probably the way that a zen philosophy and an unyielding optimism has been added to the usual bleakness of Baumbach’s worldview, as it results in a more layered, complex experience than most movies are able to offer. At its heart this seems to be a movie about change and how we define ourselves as individuals. Our life journeys, and our very senses of self, end up being defined by small, incremental changes. A change of roommate leads to you emphasizing the aspects of your personality that you share with the new person you’re living with and deemphasizing the aspects of your personality that you shared with the old. A change of neighborhood leads to you spending more time in these types of establishments and with these types of people rather than in those types of establishments and with those types of people, and your behavior alters a bit depending on what’s appropriate in each setting. On their own these changes are small and don’t amount to much, but after a long enough time they add up, and suddenly you can find yourself looking in the mirror and seeing a completely different person than the one you were used to.
