With Frances Ha, writer/director Noah Baumbach tries something entirely new - basing a film around a group of educated obnoxious people. Wait a minute..... Margot at the Wedding. The Squid and the Whale. Kicking and Screaming….. Alright, so perhaps that's nothing new for him, but it is the first time since his debut (1995's Kicking and Screaming) that he's dealing with assholes negotiating the seas between college and adulthood. Despite the similarity in assholes, Kicking and Screaming showed those assholes potentially stuck in a college burg while Frances Ha focuses on assholes in New York City. So we see the weird mingling of financial success and poverty, a city that should have more opportunities than it offers, and the transience of youth/the youthful transients.
Now a 40-something, Baumbach captures the nomadic postgraduate era well. Some of the credit for that should probably go to cowriter/actress/20something Greta Gerwig. The rapid entering and exiting of others' orbits is sharply portrayed through Frances's frequent address changes. While she makes friends and temporarily inhabits spaces, she's never quite comfortable. She dances (professionally and through the city), but she can't turn that into an occupation. So it takes the whole film, stupid decisions, and friendships (both destroyed and repaired) for her to finally settle into a stable lifestyle of compromise. The film ends on a shot of her name card claiming this new residence as hers definitively. The last part of her name is cut off, but that assures us that while Frances may be becoming a different version of herself, she still retains some of her quirky personality.
Frances Ha is a bit like its title character (apparently well-read and continually screwing up, but leaving us with a final reassurance of progress/sanity). The film seems to have a knowledge of things that great films (The Graduate, Jules et Jim, Manhattan) do, so it mimics the behaviors of those films without creating the humor, rich characters, or world that those films did. It's not a sin to aim high, but invoking these spirits also invites harsh comparison.
Perhaps "asshole" is too much of a generalization, but "complex and frequently disagreeable personage" took up too much space.
This New Republic review from David Thomson (while spending too long on Baumbach's personal history/psychology) contains a few well-said conclusions:
1. "...While “Girls” was made for an audience who resembles its characters, Frances Ha has a cozy parental appeal. This is for those of us who worry about our kids out of college in the city. Baumbach and Gerwig settle for the palatable conclusion that it’s all going to be all right"
2. "The risks in Frances Ha are cute and playful, and in time it may look not just like a fifty-year-old New York New Wave picture, but also as embarrassing as those photographs you burn before you get married. Noah Baumbach has a lot of talent, and great appetite for pure cinema, but I don’t think he is the screenwriter he deserves."
Crew & Cast
Directed by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Kicking & Screaming, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg)
Written by Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
Cast
Greta Gerwig - Frances Halladay
Mickey Sumner - Sophie Levee
Michael Esper - Dan
Adam Driver - Lev Shapiro
Michael Zegen - Benji