Only a smidge of it takes place on the actual holiday, but Mistress America has those bittersweet fall vibes, plus some unusual almost-blended-family dynamics.
Noah Baumbach is about to re-enter the Oscar conversation with his George Clooney-starring, Hollywood-friendly comedy-drama Jay Kelly. (It hits Netflix in December.) Baumbach’s life and sometime creative partner Greta Gerwig, meanwhile, has a supporting role in the film and is working on her upcoming Chronicles of Narnia adaptation, also for Netflix. But before both filmmakers ventured into bigger-budget, bigger-star territory, they were working together in smaller, Sundance-scale indies like Frances Ha and Mistress America, with Gerwig starring, Baumbach directing, and both of them co-writing. Frances Ha is their project that sits alongside Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, and Marriage Story in the Criterion Collection. But the less-seen Mistress America, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary, is just as good – as Frances Ha, or as anything else either Baumbach or Gerwig has worked on before or since. And as it happens, the perfect season to watch it is upon us.
Why watch Mistress America tonight?
After you’ve seen Planes, Trains and Automobiles the requisite 500 times, the field of classic Thanksgiving movies gets a little thin – especially if you also eliminate movies that revel in the shrill cliches of “funny” familial dysfunction. So give thanks to Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig for Mistress America, which makes for a fine Thanksgiving substitute.
The vast majority of the movie doesn’t actually take place on Thanksgiving. Most of it unfolds in the fall-semester run-up to the holiday, beginning with Tracy (Lola Kirke) arriving at Barnard in Manhattan for college, and experiencing the kind of low-key, socially-adrift freshman-year hostilities rarely depicted in campus comedies. Her divorced mother, due to remarry over the Thanksgiving weekend, urges her to contact Brooke (Greta Gerwig), her future step-sister. Brooke, hovering around 30 and already appearing to dread 40, hustles through her New York lifestyle, half self-described autodidact and half dilettante.
