Mistress AmericaFor the most part of the time, one does wander that whether it is a movie or a special one-hour sitcom episode that is about to satisfy and clear each and every cliffhangers or lose thread of this hilarious tale. Mistress America works most of the time for its smooth and short runtime along with some of the smartest and newest idea which was to create a sitcom within a feature that is not only driven by raw natured mentality but also by its petty perspectives. Noah pulls it off again with this far fetched and as usual eerie script and maintains his statistics on being at the top when it comes to family drama along with the help of Greta as a writer-actor who surprisingly is flat out funny in each and every scene. Mistress America as said earlier is a two-part episode of a sitcom in which the makers is busy prepping up the characters for the audience in the first act just to explode the can of laughing gas in its second one which along with fast paced, short runtime, amusing but genuine characters and wizened concepts antes up the film than expected.

A delightful movie as long as you like characters more than plot. Comedy yes, but serious too. The word "screwball" appears often in reviews, but this is not screwball: the characters here are real.Much is said about what Brooke brings to Tracy. But one of the revelations (and it's not exactly subtle) is how much Brooke needs Tracy and gains from the friendship. Though much younger, Tracy imbues Brooke with a degree of confidence and a sense of self that Brooke lacked.Much is said about the pace, and it does pack in a lot. But the pace is tightly managed, and when it slows down, the impact is powerful.

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig are at it again, "it" being what it means to be a 20- something in New York City. In "Mistress America," however, the lens and perspective shifts away from the character you'd expect a movie like to this to intimately follow (Gerwig's interesting, ambitious, never-boring Brooke) and instead observes her from an outsider's perspective (Tracy, played by Lola Kirke).Tracy is instead the main character, a Barnard freshman studying literature and writing, trying to make her way through that formidable (and familiar) landscape. Inspiration strikes, however, when she meets Brooke, her future step-sister. Brooke is around 30, and she's been through the grinder both personally and professionally. She is an innovator who always has big ideas, and Tracy uses her life as the basis of a short story that she hopes will get her into the school's prestigious lit magazine. Things get particularly interesting when Brooke finds herself locked out of her apartment one day and learns that her boyfriend has pulled all his financial support out of a restaurant they were just about to open together and she seeks a psychic for advice on where to turn next.Through this blossoming relationship between Tracy and Brooke we observe the typical indie film "portrait of a Millennial" in a way that both mythologizes it (evidenced by Tracy's story/perception of Brooke) and makes it hit home. Brooke is quirky and her life is a melodrama, but it also feels very real. Baumbach and Gerwig's previous collaboration, "Frances Ha," also struck this seemingly contradictory chord of authenticity and whimsy. When there is a dissonance, it's softened by the knowledge that there's such emotional truth at the core of what they're doing.Another way of putting it is that Baumbach and Gerwig aren't so interested in plot points and what happens. At less than 90 minutes, this movie about a relationship between a younger and older 20-something is not trying to show you something you've never seen before. What they do care about is the trajectory of the relationships between characters. It's hard not to see a piece of yourself in the characters, especially if you're of a similar age, and that holds our attention enough that "Mistress America" doesn't fall apart, even when it's not especially compelling."Mistress America" also tends to be be philosophical and angsty. The level of intellectual conversation is to a degree that rarely happens in real life, let alone in these perfect scene-length snippets, but again, like other parts of the film that gravitate closer to being over-the-top, the creative choice to lean that way comes from a strong and earnest desire to explore very relevant themes and ideas.Frankly, Baumbach and Gerwig could tell a hundred different stories about coming of age in your 20s or 30s in a big city and I'd watch (especially at such a reasonable runtime). But even if you don't think you could, the effort they make to explore a unique "relationship" between two women in "Mistress America" and cast light on this familiar film from a new angle makes this particularly story worthwhile.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

Over the years, I've liked some of Noah Baumbach's films, but not others, and this one I'm sorry to say was disappointing. Here, Baumbach directed and co-wrote the script with Greta Gerwig.The underrated and most talented Gerwig also stars in the movie as Brooke, a free spirit who's leading a whirlwind of a life, with a myriad of part-time jobs but looking to close a deal on a new restaurant, in the Williamsburg section of NYC.Lola Kirke co-stars here and gives a fine performance as Tracy, a first year college student at Barnard, aspiring to be a writer but having loads of problems fitting in on campus. Brooke and Tracy are slated to be step sisters when Brooke's father and Tracy's mother marry in the near future.Thus, when Tracy, at the urging of her mother, calls Brooke and they meet for the first time in Manhattan, Tracy finds herself willingly caught up in the cyclone of Brooke's life. Tracy even finds herself using Brooke as inspiration for her short story that she submits to the prestigious Mobius Literary Society at her college.All of this seems well and good, but for me the problem with the movie is in the dialogue, which often came across to me as mostly pretentious, whiny, and even mean-spirited at times. Thus, the characters that emerged were so shallow and self-absorbed that I mostly lost interest in what would happen to any of them. When that happens to me as I view a film, I start checking the time wondering when it will be finally over.Overall, Gerwig and Kirke are solid here, with many actors in supporting roles adding much as well. However, as mentioned the occasional clever or humorous line was overshadowed by dialogue that came across to me as affected and pretentious, leading to surfacy and shallow characters.