Mistress America was funny. But it was also scattered and tiring. It rambled. It was muddled. And it did not sell its premise to me well enough. It’s a good enough movie to escape for a short time for a matinee, but if you’ve choices for that time, think about which way to spend your hour-and-a-half.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love watching Greta Gerwig. She has that sort of presence that I appreciate on the screen—funny, laughing, and flawed while delivering humility and shining with complicated beauty. And I absolutely loved Noah Baumbach’s Francis Ha (which he wrote and in which Gerwig starred). But Mistress America lacks the depth that quietly snuck through in Francis Ha. Mistress America seems to try too hard. And where it’s trying too hard, it’s because it’s not doing what it needs to be doing, subtly.
Aside from the misses, though, I loved seeing yet another film about women and their growing and coming into themselves. This film has a unique twist as it takes our more traditional coming-of-age place of late teens and adds on the newer coming-of-age focus of the thirty-year-old. The problem, of course, is that the two ages are so completely different, I just did not buy where they fit together. Even with the premise of why these two women come into each other’s lives, a rung on the ladder connecting them was missing, or at best, hanging loose. Too much that could have been better, deeper, more layered in their stories gets lost. Instead, the issues, conversations, and scenes scatter.
I’m not sorry that I saw the film. It’s certainly much better than many that I have seen. But it’s not one I felt particularly over by. It’s not one I’ll necessarily remember.