Movie Review: Frances Ha

4 stars out of 5

I have mixed feelings about Noah Baumbach. Right off the bat in 1995, Kicking and Screaming didn’t do it for me. And Squid and the Whale, which everybody loved, I thought was so-so. Greenberg, however, I did love. And Mr. Jealousy, I was very excited about the concept, obtained a VHS copy, watched a little bit, got distracted, meant to watch the rest… but before I knew it all the technology had changed on me.

So to try to win me over this time, Baumbach raises the stakes with his star and co-writer, Greta Gerwig. She was terrific in Greenberg and she is flat-out wonderful here. In fact, I’ve fallen madly in love with Greta Gerwig. Or with Frances. I’m not sure. Anyway, Greta’s already going out with Baumbach. How clichéd, right?

The movie is totally charming and very funny. It’s in black-and-white and we’ve got the Jewish writer/director with the shiksa-goddess star, so it seems people are comparing this to Manhattan. And also one of the guys from Girls is in it and they’re in Brooklyn sometimes and there are young women and too much money. All I know is, if Girls was more like Frances Ha, I would’ve watched past the first three episodes.

What we get here is a delightful and laugh-filled portrayal of friendship, with Frances and her BFF roommate Sophie. And then, as I imagine we’ve all been through at some point, Frances loses her friend to… dun-dun-duhhhh…. a relationship. Rudderless Frances now tries to fill that void while simultaneously coping with the fact that her professional life (dancing) is not going according to plan. It’s interesting to me that Frances is 27. I’ve found that, at least in the New York that Frances inhabits, these maturity issues tend to strike a little bit later (29, perhaps). Though in fairness, I think Gerwig was 27 when writing this, and there are other autobiographical touches: her parents play her parents in her real hometown of Sacramento.

And did I mention Gerwig is fantastic? Hilarious, quirky, touching, goofy, awkward, hopeful. A strong physical presence and a subtle emotional one. There’s an undercurrent of whimsy in Frances’s world, and a couple of times I felt the influence of Baumbach’s buddy Wes Anderson. As for Baumbach and Gerwig’s sharp, conversational script, Who knows who wrote what but there are some real gems here. (Two Frances comments, one on parenthood and one about Walden Pond, really had me laughing a lot.)

A perfect movie? Nah. Slows down a wee bit in the middle. It’s very much an upper-middle-class/lower-upper-class world (the sort where Dean and Britta from Luna are at a dinner party, albeit not playing themselves), and that can get slightly tiresome. And (like on Girls), the men seem a little, I don’t know, “soft.” But these are minor gripes. It’s a smart, cool little film and you root for Frances every step of the way.