Written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig
Directed by Noah Baumbach
*1/2 (one and a half stars)
"I'm so embarrassed! I'm just not a real person yet."
-Frances
And so it goes for the titular Frances, a young woman and aspiring dancer of 27, living in New York city, struggling to find her way in the world and feeling so far behind her social circle. While this sort of a story goes directly to the heart of my personal sensibilities, I have to say without hesitation how much I vehemently hated this movie.
Yes, dear readers, Writer/Director Noah Baumbach has hit his third strike with me in "Frances Ha," a would be "coming of age"/"arrested development" film starring the insufferably unctuous and irritating Greta Gerwig who, I am afraid, is not nearly as charming and beguiling as some critics, Baumbach and perhaps even Gerwig herself thinks she is. For those of you who do not frequent independent films or art films or for those who actually hate them, "Frances Ha" is precisely the type of independent art film that would make you hate the genre. It is painfully precious to a fault. It is completely self-congratulatory, smug and filled to the brim with endless amounts of hipster irony that the entire proceedings feel to be placed within a set of quotation marks and not one moment at any point ever feels to be emotionally authentic. I hated this movie. Good God, did I HATE this movie, especially when it could have been so wonderful but it seems as if Baumbach allowed the purity of the story to get away from him as he has seemingly fallen completely in love with every good thing any critic has said abut him and he just wallowed in it to beat the band. In an already disappointing movie year, "Frances Ha" stands out as being one of the worst I've seen so far in 2013.
Greta Gerwig, who also co-wrote the film, stars as Frances, the aforementioned 27 year old aspiring dancer living in new York City. As the film opens, we are presented with a montage sequence that would not be out of place in any movie love story, except this time we are given the romance contained within the friendship between Frances and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner--TRIVIA ALERT she's Sting's daughter), with whom she shares an apartment. When Sophie decides to move in with her boyfriend Patch (Patrick Heusinger), Frances falls into an emotional tailspin, making her question her place in the world which now feels so precarious without the one friend who has truly given her life meaning.
As I previously stated, this type of a storyline goes straight to me heart as I just carry this inexplicable penchant for tales of the young and young at heart on a journey of self-discovery. The restlessness of the 20's is an era of one's life cycle that I feel has not been explored either very much or very well in film and that era is just aching to have compelling stories told for that age group. When I was in my 20's, I was fortunate to have a few (many of them tended to feature Eric Stoltz in them for some reason) to latch onto but when the horrendous "Reality Bites" (1994) was the one to gain the most notoriety, you must realize how misrepresented that age group happens to be in the movies, and how much better they deserve to be served.
With "Frances Ha," Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig do have at their disposal what could have been a wonderful story of female friendship combined with the youthful inertia caused by uncertainty, identity crisis and the lack of knowledge at how to navigate the real world. They also have thoughtfully included the sense of creating a self-imposed sense of competition that lurks at the heart of Frances as she deals with her peers who are moving onwards socially, romantically or those who just can simply afford to be romantic layabouts due to having the finances to fall back upon and squander. I also thought a great touch to include in the film was this idea of emotional conclusion and how while we might not be able to always see the end in sight, we always know, and painfully so, when the relationship in question is just over. Everything is here for a film that I would tend to embrace but Noah Baumbach has just flooded it with the worst of his artistic tendencies thus robbing it of any emotional resonance, truth or soul.
In my review of Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" I defended his over the top artistic pursuits because that is indeed his specialized cinematic aesthetic and he should always be allowed to make his film his way and not conform his style for mere mass appeal or accessibility. For that, he does indeed run the risk of alienating a sector of a potential audience and for that, so be it. I feel exactly the same about Noah Baumbach, a filmmaker I have championed for many years as his first three films, "Kicking and Screaming" (1995), "Mr. Jealousy" (1997) and the extraordinary "The Squid and the Whale" (2005) were all precise, literate, perceptive and very smart comedy/dramas that exhibited a personal style that always felt emotionally true to sometimes uncomfortably painful degrees. Beginning with the odious "Margot At The Wedding" (2007) and continuing with the inert "Greenberg" (2010), Baumbach's films have become much more mannered, less inspired or even remotely insightful. "Frances Ha" equals "Margot At The Wedding" for being the worst of his output to date as he demonstrates that he has absolutely nothing, and I mean, nothing new to say on the subject of an individual's sense of inertia, his standard theme, and no amount of nods to the films of the French New Wave (most notably the films of Francois Truffaut), the glorious music selections from composer Georges Delerue or Woody Allen's "Manhattan" (1979) can cover the fact that "Frances Ha" is sadly bankrupt.
For a film that has been decorated with black and white cinematography, why in the world did Baumbach decided to shoot his film digitally? It was a terrible move as it made his movie often look like a television show clouded by such bad reception that I was looking for a set of rabbit ears to help re-adjust the picture quality. By delving deeper into the film itself, I was stunned by the stilted, static line readings by all of the cast members, a tactic that diffused any sense of emotional connection to the characters and the story. It was as if absolutely no one in the film believed anything that they were saying or they just (barely) learned their lines right before the cameras rolled. But I have to say that now after having seen her taking the full lead of a performance, the appeal of Greta Gerwig is entirely lost on me. I just do not understand the amounts of praise that have been heaped upon her and with this film, I am really at a complete loss. Her performance is fully indicative of the film as a whole and why I hated it as much as I did because "Frances Ha" claims to be a film about a young woman of 27 attempting to find herself but in reality, this is a movie that is pretending to be a film about a young woman attempting to find herself. Gerwig, and the film as a whole, all seem to be playing dress up and never for one instant did I believe in anything that was happening. "Frances Ha" felt to be so prefabricated, so plastic, so erroneous, concocted and flat out false that I actually wondered if Baumbach and Gerwig had completely forgotten what this time of life actually feels like in order to represent it authentically.
Greta Gerwig's performance did absolutely nothing to endear me to "Frances Ha." In fact, she kept me at arms length for almost the entire stretch of the film. While she does have some good moments here and there (her racing to an ATM machine was a good one), all of her flouncing around, from one end of this film to the other, made her appear to be like a life sized version of an awkward, gangly Muppet clamoring for attention but unlike this character, Muppets have identifiable souls and are surprisingly more realistic than this character as portrayed by Gerwig.
Like I said, Gerwig seems to be engaged in the process of pretending instead of being and because of that, the entire conceit of the film falls into a deep hole of extreme superficiality from which it cannot climb out from. At times, "Frances Ha" reminded me of the HBO series "Girls," a show that I have not been able to embrace, not for lack of trying, as I immediately grew tired of viewing these privileged white young woman flowing through their lives in such an artificial fashion that the obvious cultural commentary that Writer/Director/Actress Lena Dunham wants to explore never really rose to the top. That exact same problem derails "Frances Ha" as Frances bounces from apartment to apartment and takes an ill fated weekend jaunt to Paris all the while paying lip service to how "poor" she is that like Dunham, any cultural commentary Baumbach and Gerwig may be desiring to explore about growing up over educated and underemployed in the 21st century also gets lost in all of the fake window dressing.
Due to Gerwig's irritating performance, I found the character of Frances to be unbearably cloying, painfully self-absorbed and disastrously narcissistic. Of course, Frances' descent is due to her increasingly fractured friendship with Sophie but even then, "Frances Ha" felt to be so false as Gerwig and Sumner have no chemistry together and as characters, I could not understand why these two women were even friends in the first place as they seem to be at odds from the very beginning. Having Frances and Sophie say "I love you" ad nauseum and platonically sharing a bed together is not enough to convey a full history of friendship.
Just take a quick look back at Director Paul Feig's "Bridesmaids" (2011), so beautifully written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo a film that explored many of the exact same themes as "Frances Ha" and witness how the history of a friendship was fully evident between the roles played by Wiig and Maya Rudolph, especially when they didn't even share that much screen time together. Or look to two particularly strong films from just last year Director Lee Toland Krieger's "Celeste And Jesse Forever" or Director Lynn Shelton's "Your Sister's Sister," where both of those films explored the growing pains that exist in all friendships as the individuals within those friendships evolve. "Frances Ha" never reached those heights for me due to its inexcusable lack of genuineness. Look, I do not need Frances to be accessible or even likable. I need to have a sense of her humanity to understand her and Greta Gerwig's performance as well as her conception of her alongside Baumbach just failed for me.
Dear readers, I will always applaud Noah Baumbach's commitment to his artistic visions and believe me, even as much as I detested his latest film, I would be even sadder if he tossed his individualistic qualities all away for the pursuit of mass appeal. Even so, and after three films that have underwhelmed me to varying degrees, I just do not know how much longer I can hold onto him, even as much as I have loved and treasured his artistic voice in the past.
But like the character of Frances herself, maybe it is time for me to not spin my wheels and wonder when it all went south and just realize that this cinematic romance may just be mercifully over.
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