I HAVE MOVED

Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for reading CinemaSlants these few years. I have moved my writing over to a new blog: The Screen Addict. You can find it here: http://thescreenaddict.com/.

I hope you follow me to my new location! You can find an explanation for the move on that site now or on the CinemaSlants Facebook page.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Frances Ha (2013)


The eponymous protagonist of Frances Ha is never happier than in the film’s opening montage, as we watch her and her best friend simply go about their quirky existences in a black-and-white New York City. Everything about them appears carefree, and they seem like two people who are completely content with just existing in the status quo. Then, in the first scene after the title card, the status quo is challenged. From there things begin to slowly drift away from Frances, and it seems like everyone is looking to grow up and take charge of their lives and careers except her. This description makes the movie sound much more joyless than it is, as Frances Ha is a delight of an experience that revolves around the considerable gravitational pull of its star Greta Gerwig. She helped write the film with director Noah Baumbach, and as a result this is the perfect role at the perfect time.


This initial challenge to said status quo comes when her boyfriend asks her to move in with him. When she declines, they break up. Not long after, Frances’ best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) moves out of the apartment they share together, leaving our heroine all alone in her world of whimsy. When she eventually has to find a new place herself, she drifts from location to location looking for absolutely anything to which she can latch on. She just wants to twirl around the city with her friend and start a dancing career and avoid grown-up work at every opportunity. Really, though, her main problem is finding a friendship that comes close to what she had with Sophie. She comes close when she moves in with Lev (Adam Driver) and Benji (Michael Zegen), but she can never quite find precisely what she is looking for.

There’s not a whole lot about Frances Ha that’s wildly original, and in the plot/structure department there’s just about nothing to speak of. Frances does something, then she does something else, and then another thing, and this formula repeats itself until the credits roll. That’s a slight problem, and that means that this movie is doomed to live and die by its charms. Luckily, these charms are plentiful, and just about all of them involve Gerwig in some way. She gives the type of performance that lets the audience know who she is from the first time we see her. She’s a strange and sometimes frustrating character, but she’s frustrating in a magnetic, weirdly likable way. Contrast this to Baumbach’s own Greenberg, which presented us with a similarly problematic protagonist but never really gave us a reason to like him. The people are oddly similar, but Gerwig is likely the chief reason that Frances Ha succeeds where Baumbach’s previous film failed.

It’s also a wonderfully cheery film, despite the fact that it focuses quite a bit on the economic struggles of its lead. Baumbach never attempts to turn Frances Ha into some deep statement on anything, and instead just settles on making it a specific comedy about a specific character living in a specific New York City environment. On that level, it’s absolutely terrific. It is funny, fully realized and engagingly performed. Gerwig has been an actress on the verge of stardom for a little bit now, and while this movie may reach too narrow an audience to really have her break through, it certainly has the potential to give her the boost she so deeply deserves. It is one of the best performances of the year so far, and it comes in a film that may not be the most ambitious piece of entertainment, but it’s hard to find an area in which it comes up short of its goals.


Grade: A-

No comments:

Post a Comment