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Noah Baumbachs New York renaissance

MISTRESS AMERICA directed by Noah Baumbach, written by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, with Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Matthew Shear and Kathryn Erbe. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release. 84 minutes. Opens Friday (August 21). See listings.


NEW YORK CITY – “It’s good to be back in New York,” says Noah Baumbach as he sits down to lunch in a Lower Manhattan restaurant. While he’s speaking of the immediate moment – he’s been out of town for a bit – it also sums up his career.

Baumbach has been making movies for two decades now, starting with the sly character comedies Kicking And Screaming and Mr. Jealousy and then shifting into a run of increasingly dark and caustic pictures.

The Squid And The Whale, Margot At The Wedding and Greenberg are technically comedies, but they’re also profoundly sad films about people trapped inside their own bubbles, drifting further and further away from their best selves. If there’s an American auteur who’s risen up to fill the void created by Woody Allen’s growing irrelevance, it’s Baumbach.

And then, just when he seemed ready to crash out, Baumbach reinvented himself in three New York comedies in rapid succession: Frances Ha in 2012, While We’re Young last year and now Mistress America.

We order salads (they’re good here mine has bacon), and Baumbach – characteristically cerebral, revising his thoughts as he utters them – admits that he’s never all that comfortable discussing his movies.

“Filmmaking is so not – it’s sort of – you know, it’s the whole thing,” he says. “If you could explain it, you wouldn’t make it. And then you’re asked to explain it.”

It’s okay. We’ll get there.

Mistress America stars Lola Kirke (Gone Girl, Mozart In The Jungle) as Tracy, a wide-eyed college freshman taken under the wing of the older but not necessarily wiser Brooke. Brooke is played by Baumbach’s real-life partner and collaborator, Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the film with him.

“After Frances, it was really just, like, ‘Let’s do another one,’” he says. “[Greta] had started writing something else, and I was maybe going to get involved with that. We were toying with it and we came up with the Brooke character and decided to take [that] character and create a movie around her. That’s what ultimately became this movie.”

Mistress America slots perfectly into the arc of Baumbach’s renaissance.

The New York trilogy counters the distinctly unjoyful triptych of Squid, Margot and ultimately Greenberg, which Baumbach wrote with his then-wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’d co-starred in Margot At The Wedding. Released in 2010, Greenberg featured a revelatory performance by Ben Stiller as a morose New Yorker in Los Angeles who falls into bed with his brother’s assistant (Gerwig).

“I think probably to some degree, one thing all these movies dramatize is how the world is always offering us opportunities,” Baumbach says. “People are offering us love or they’re offering us themselves – and are we able to receive it? Are we able to see it, even?”

It may not be a coincidence that the end of this dark run coincided with the end of Baumbach’s marriage in 2010. He rebounded with Frances Ha, co-written with and starring Gerwig, though the two had yet to begin their personal relationship. The picture marked a real change in tone, bouncing around Manhattan and Brooklyn alongside the title character in luminous black-and-white as she made a difficult transition into adulthood.

“A lot of it, for me, was about seeing a place that was very familiar to me with new eyes,” he says. “But none of that was conscious going in. I just felt like it’d be fun to shoot this movie here this way.”

The tone of this latest run of films seemed clear to him from the start. 

“All of them, I felt, should end in some kind of traditionally comic way – although obviously there’s a balance of melancholy and humour, as I feel there probably should be. It’s just, I guess, which way I’m pivoting.”

He’s also discovered the freedom of working under the radar. He didn’t even discuss Mistress America publicly until it was slated for this year’s Sundance Festival. How do you even pull off something like that?

“The deal we had with my financier on Frances and Mistress was, you know, ‘I’m not gonna show you a script in advance,’” he says. “I think that’s the difference. Once scripts get to agencies they get passed around, and then it sort of gets out who’s doing it. Announcements get made. And it just didn’t happen on these. It’s a way to control it, but it’s not deliberately set out to be secretive.”

This strategy has served Baumbach pretty well, though – and when I press him a little he admits he does enjoy just dropping movies into the world.

“It’s how I grew up,” he says. “Often when I saw the ads in the subway or the paper, [that] was the first time I knew about a movie coming out. And I still like the magic of that. I like it about other people’s movies as well, to know as little as possible. But it’s not the way of the world right now.”

The world – or at least the internet – is more interested in gossipy clickbait, such as how While We’re Young, in which Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a 40-something couple whose marriage is revitalized when they befriend younger hipsters Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, is really an allegory for his own real-life partnership with the younger Gerwig.

Baumbach says it isn’t, but he understands how one might think that.

“I mean, for reasons that I obviously understand, people will always [say], ‘Well, Squid And The Whale had these autobiographical sort of things….’ But I’m revealing myself as much in Mistress America as I am in The Squid And The Whale. It’s just that maybe it’s harder to trace back to my autobiography. But I also wrote While We’re Young before I was with Greta, so…” he laughs. 

Baumbach assures me he won’t be bringing a surprise film to TIFF next month. (He won’t even be attending the festival, he says with some regret.) But the next picture won’t be long in coming, and could even feature Stiller again.

“Yeah, I’d love to keep working with him,” he says. “He’s a great partner on these things. You know, he grew up in the city [and] I grew up in Brooklyn, but when we met each other we just sort of recognized some-thing. You know – that thing where you meet a grown-up you didn’t know as a kid but you think, ‘Oh, I know you.’”

There’s also Baumbach’s side gig as a screenwriter.

He co-wrote Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox, adapted Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for a never-completed HBO series and even worked on the animated feature Madagascar 3 for his friend Stiller. (Mistress America ends with a thanks to DreamWorks Animation.)

“When they called me up, I thought maybe I would do a couple of weeks on the movie,” he recalls. “But animation [is] this long process, and I ended up just staying on. It was a contribution I felt I could make, and they seemed to like what I did.”

I ask if he’s likely to do that sort of work again. Baumbach says he thinks so.

“It’s nice to make things that my five-year-old can see,” he laughs.

Read our review of Mistress America here, our Q&A with Lola Kirke here and Noah Baumbach’s Top 5 influences here.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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