Nights and Weekends (2008)

Greta Gerwig came out of the 2000s (and the so-called “Mumblecore” era) as something of an ‘It’ girl, at least for a moment, and parlayed that into both mainstream acting success and now as a director with her two most recent films, Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019). However, she did have a co-directing credit on one of her collaborations with Joe Swanberg in that initial period, and there’s a lot that’s fascinating about the collaboration, even if it hardly takes my weddings and romance-themed week on the blog in very much happier directions.

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Joe Swanberg has made a huge number of films, many of which (like Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), also starring Gerwig, or 2011’s Art History with Josephine Decker) have a sort of improvised, raw feel to them — perhaps the result of the budgets or the shooting style, but it’s a kind of style I feel an affinity towards, because it seems to be coming from a different direction from most mainstream cinema. Still, he’s in the business of telling stories, and it’s key here that his co-star Greta Gerwig is credited as co-director and co-writer, because this feels as much about her (probably more so, honestly) than it does about his character. Both bare themselves literally (hardly unusual for Swanberg, who often delves into on-screen sexuality, whether as director or as performer), but there’s something intense about the way Gerwig presents on screen that helps you move through her emotions, far more than Swanberg, who as an actor doesn’t seem quite as upfront. That said, they both have some great scenes together that are always just held that moment (or minute, or eternity) longer than you expect, meaning they move beyond the usual relationship moments to present something more ambiguous and messy and complex. I don’t love it all, but there’s a core of something that I like very much.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig; Cinematographers Matthias Grunsky and Benjamin Kasulke; Starring Greta Gerwig, Joe Swanberg; Length 80 minutes.
Seen at home (Le Cinema Club streaming), London, Tuesday 18 February 2020.

Little Women (2019)

Given this film has only just been released, it’s a late entry into my contenders for favourite of the year. To my shame, I’ve never seen a previous adaptation, and I’ve had the book unread on my shelf for half my life. I intend to remedy both points, as I’ve now ordered a copy of the much-beloved 1994 version by Gillian Armstrong; I was a teenager when it came out which may be why I didn’t see it then. Still, this latest film convinces me that it’ll be worthwhile.

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I’ve seen some criticisms of this that mostly follow along the lines of the way it’s put together — not just the tricksy narrative conceit of bridging a seven year gap in the sisters’ storylines by constant cross-cutting, and the way that the death of [you all know which one right; we all know that surely by now, this story having been made so very many times?] becomes so emblematic of the death of their childhoods, as they move into a world of adult responsibilities… but also the way that the editing feels rather choppy, as if in a rush to move through this story. I can understand that some might suggest it would make a better miniseries, but honestly I think there’s little need to dwell too long on such a familiar story.

Despite not having read the original or seen any previous adaptation, the character arcs feel somehow very familiar, even as director Greta Gerwig brings something modern to the story. I imagine the older sister Meg has always felt a little bit underpowered (and requires someone of the iconic stature of Emma Watson to even bring a little bit of pathos to a very telegraphed storyline). Beth has humanity here, ironically a little bit more life to her than I had expected, but as presented it feels as if Little Women is canonically all about the conflict between Jo and Amy — and those more familiar with the story can put me right if this isn’t the case. Both Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh are wonderful actors, perhaps the best of anyone in the cast (and this is a cast with Laura Dern and Meryl Streep in it), but they capture the most attention, and there’s as much nuance in both performances as in any of recent memory (as much as in Streep’s, doing some of her finest work in years I think for the number of scenes she has). There are, for example, inflections to Ronan’s face in certain scenes that pull me back strongly to Cate Blanchett in Carol (if only because I’ve seen that film so often and so recently, not that I’m suggesting anything about Jo, though it certainly did cross my mind).

Aside from the acting, there’s a heavy emphasis on the monetary, proprietorial nature of marriage in this era, the sense of romantic partnership as transaction, which is what makes Amy’s storyline in particular so freighted with pathos. There’s this short scene where Streep’s elderly aunt calls Amy in from painting, something she loves and enjoys and wants to make a success out of (despite her self-awareness of her own limitations), to baldly inform her that the fate of the family basically rests on her making a good marriage and to forget about the frivolity of learning and artistic endeavour she’s currently engaged in. There are several scenes of this nature — in which women are confronted matter-of-factly with the reality of their world — that pass by almost subliminally, given the aforementioned speed of the film and its editing, but which resoundingly linger as these contrapuntal notes in what is otherwise a beautiful, warm and enriching film about life, with all the autumnal beauty and familial warmth you’d expect from a U-rated period drama. I suppose it could feel a little heavy-handed, but I think it all works enormously well within the context of a properly family film to make clear the constraints within which the characters live.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Greta Gerwig (based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott); Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux; Starring Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Eliza Scanlen, Meryl Streep; Length 135 minutes.
Seen at Odeon Holloway, London, Thursday 26 December 2019.

Maggie’s Plan (2015)

Yet another film — I feel like I see one every few months, but maybe I just like to seek them out — that fits neatly into the burgeoning romcom subgenre of New York-set films about middle-class intellectuals trying to find love. Many of them star Greta Gerwig; Maggie’s Plan is no different. That said, and I suppose a range of opinions may be available, but I think Gerwig is great, an intensely likeable screen presence whose delivery energises even the most familiar material. Here, the film follows the usual roundelay of attachments — Maggie is a teacher who falls for social anthropologist John (Ethan Hawke), who’s having trouble in his marriage to the frosty Georgette (Julianne Moore) — but it doesn’t insist on marriage or even romance as the way forward. That in itself makes it worthwhile, quite aside from all its excellent comic performances (Julianne Moore remains a force of nature).

NEW RELEASE FILM REVIEW
Director/Writer Rebecca Miller; Cinematographer Sam Levy; Starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Tuesday 12 July 2016.

Mistress America (2015)

Screwball comedy seems to be back in with US cinema at the moment, perhaps an expression of yearning for a long-gone era when filmmakers got to just indulge their borderline-sociopathic characters with witty wordplay, showing little regard for the naturalism that seemed so important to the New American Cinema of the 60s onwards. It allows for a rush of pure cinephilia, but unlike Peter Bogdanovich’s recent She’s Funny That Way, Noah Baumbach’s film, co-written by his star Greta Gerwig, has a more contemporary feel. It’s still based around suffocating WASPy upper-middles making their idle way through life, a milieu familiar from Frances Ha (or the sitcom Girls, featuring co-star Lola Kirke’s sister), but it mines that for some excellent laughs. Much of this is at the expense of Kirke’s first-year college student Tracy and her pretentious literary fellows (she’s a budding writer), but the source is Gerwig’s irrepressible Brooke, just turned 30 and still living precariously in New York City. Brooke has big plans but a history of others taking them on to achieve the success she can only fantasise about, and Tracy steps into this role as a potential sister-in-law (thanks to their parents’ impending marriage). One imagines the film could collapse at any moment — plenty of the relationships within it do — but it all manages to nimbly keep afloat and keep the laughs coming, even when some of the emotional terrain becomes more fraught. Gerwig’s Brooke is a complex character, at once warm and good to be around but also with a streak of mean self-absorption, nothing near as excoriating as the literary poseurs of Listen Up Philip (another film sharing some of the same terrain), but certainly challenging to those around her. Baumbach’s style though seems to be lightening up a little, making for more enjoyable films, and this one is equally driven by its musical soundtrack, heavy on the 80s synth sounds of such bands as Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark — and that at least is enough to keep me happy.

CREDITS
Director Noah Baumbach; Writers Baumbach and Greta Gerwig; Cinematographer Sam Levy; Starring Lola Kirke, Greta Gerwig; Length 84 minutes.
Seen at Picturehouse Central, London, Monday 17 August 2015.

Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007)

Every generation, I guess, has its cinema of self-involved navel-gazing, and for whatever it’s worth (not always very much to some critics it appears), this must be mine. I grew up in New Zealand which in the 2000s had its own micro-budget lo-fi independent digitally-shot relationship dramas, and New York it turns out has its (more widely-known) analogue with the so-called “mumblecore” scene (based largely around the creative personnel involved with this film), and presumably taking its name from the improvisational style of the dialogue. And yet, for me, it sometimes feels like there are completely different types of emotions unearthed within this idiom than in your more polished festival (and multiplex) fare, and for that I like it.

Andrew Bujalski (probably the pre-eminent director in the scene) plays Paul, the senior partner in a creative writing duo with Kent Osborne’s Matt. They work in a fairly bland little office for what appears to be a TV show. However, it’s their intern Hannah (Greta Gerwig) who is the film’s focus, as you might have guessed from the title, and her character is the one most nakedly exposed (quite literally in the first and last shots of the film). Over the course of the film, she gets into relationships with three of the men in the film, as she deals with a certain kind of early-20s ennui.

Having gone on to further successes, most prominently in Frances Ha earlier this year, it’s unsurprisingly Greta Gerwig who dominates the film, and your enjoyment of it is likely to be predicated on how charming and identifiable you find her. As it happens, I do. She has a deft and likeable comedic presence, while not sacrificing a kind of unfocused sadness at her character’s core, which she is only slowly (and with great difficulty) able to open up about in a conversation late in the film with Matt. She can be contrary and contradictory, but there’s an openness to the way she delivers it that I find likeable.

It’s the dialogue scenes, which I understand were largely improvised (hence the writing credits for most of the cast), that give the movie its momentum and with which some reviewers have taken issue. Yet I like the halting silences and lacunae that realistically inflect the conversations. For example, there’s a beautifully-judged scene in which Hannah invites Paul up to her flat and they meet her flatmate, who swiftly exits, whereupon the scene sort of judders to a fantastically awkward halt. Most of the time the cast banters affectionately, which provides the ebb and flow of the narrative, as unfocused as its characters.

It may not be a grand statement or a glamorous one, but in its way it says a lot about people in their early-20s learning to find their feet. At least as long as such films continue to star actors as watchable as Greta Gerwig, I’ll continue to be happy to watch them fumble through life on shaky digital video.

CREDITS
Director/Cinematographer Joe Swanberg; Writers Swanberg, Greta Gerwig, Kent Osbourne and Andrew Bujalski; Starring Greta Gerwig, Kent Osborne, Andrew Bujalski; Length 83 minutes.
Seen at ICA, London, Sunday 25 August 2013.

Frances Ha (2012)

I started keeping a spreadsheet (well, a notebook originally) of films I’d been to see around the time I started going to university. My best friend of the time would take me along to interesting-sounding movies, and among the films of that first year was Noah Baumbach’s debut Kicking and Screaming (1995), about which I don’t remember much except that it dealt with aimless university graduates and had a tricksy narrative structure. I imagine if I’d been a few years older I’d have identified with the characters more, after a few years studying film and reading the classics, and certainly I had some aimless years in my 20s (I’m not convinced I’ve really progressed far from there, actually, save perhaps for a more stable living situation). It’s the same middle-class world of New York-based artists and intellectuals that Baumbach has mined in those of his films I’ve seen since then, and if it’s the kind of milieu that I chiefly associate with movies (whether his or Whit Stillman’s, Wes Anderson’s, Woody Allen’s or the recent ‘mumblecore’ movement), then it’s certainly a comfortable milieu. Yet it can sometimes feel suffocatingly airless, preying on generational narcissism; I saw characteristics in this past year’s Stuck in Love and it’s evident here too. And yet, I am sucker for this kind of thing and Frances Ha does it with exceptional charm.

Part of this charm is the way it shamelessly draws on its influences, while being sure to carefully credit them. It very clearly wants to be a Nouvelle Vague film — François Truffaut’s iconic actor Jean-Pierre Léaud is namechecked and Georges Delerue music from his films is used, while the protagonist even visits Paris at one point — and at its best it could stand alongside those early-60s films of Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer with its watchful camera and short spontaneous scenes. The black-and-white photography recalls Raoul Coutard in those years, or perhaps more apropos, the Gordon Willis who shot Woody Allen’s high period films, particularly the monochrome Manhattan (1979). It just imparts to everything a kind of timelessness: Frances Ha is set in the present, but in its music and visual cues it constantly harks to the past.

The resulting tension is reflective of the stasis in which its eponymous central character — well, almost eponymous, as her surname is longer than “Ha” — finds herself. I’ve seen it described as a ‘coming of age story’ and perhaps that’s right, or at least suggests something of the heroine’s struggle, and yet she’s 27 years old: she’s out of university, unsuccessfully pursuing a career as a dancer, unable (or unwilling) to sustain a relationship and unsure what to do. There’s a heartbreaking stretch of the film where everything just seems to go wrong for her, not in a melodramatic way, but just that way that things go sometimes (missed connections, misunderstandings, social embarrassments). But the film isn’t thankfully out to be misanthropic or to wallow in misery: Frances may have difficulty achieving her vaunted ambitions, but she is a stubborn character.

I’ve talked already about some of the ways the film is charming, but chief among them is its star (and co-writer) Greta Gerwig, an heir to Allen’s neurotic heroines of the 1970s without the WASPy excesses. She manages to pull off the kind of ‘free-spirited’ role that’s too often a lazy (male) screenwriter’s idea of femininity (Manic Pixie Dream Girls, anyone?), without sacrificing her right to be taken seriously as a character. There’s plenty of resulting comedy too, such as a wonderful scene where she is breaking up with her boyfriend but is able to animatedly take a phone call from her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Frances frequently, in fact, punctures a sombre gathering with her cheerful (and at times tactless) humour.

What it all adds up to is unclear: it’s mostly a persuasive portrait of one type of late-20s ennui, loosely organised by the different addresses in which Frances lives, thereby charting her move towards increasing security. Part of what I like about it is identifying with what I want to imagine my own 20s were like, but there’s also plenty that I think is valuable and wonderful and even heartwarming.

CREDITS
Director Noah Baumbach; Writers Baumbach and Greta Gerwig; Cinematographer Sam Levy; Starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner; Length 86 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Fulham Road, London, Saturday 10 August 2013.