Greta Gerwig

Of mumblecore and men

Regretfully, I am among the legion of people, mostly men, who thought Ken was the best part of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. He was having so much fun! Ken was not saddled with any of the emotional weight Barbie is made to carry; Ken gets to have a hilarious subplot that finds him discovering and sharing the tenets of patriarchy, while Barbie must learn that human womanhood is complex and painfully bound to patriarchy, though still often rewarding.

Ken is a part of a lineage I cherish in Gerwig’s filmography: foolish men. I love the men in her movies, not because of who they are or what they represent, but because Gerwig writes them perfectly. Irritating, goofy, navel-gazing dummies, poisoned by an obsession with ironic distance. These were the men of the mumblecore era that incubated Gerwig’s talents as a writer, director, and performer. They are inconclusive people, waystations marking her characters’ roads to adulthood. Those characters, equally self-effacing and foolish as the men, always have a long way to go, but there’s never a question that she deserves better, that she’ll figure this out soon enough.

I watch those early performances of hers now with the knowledge that Gerwig does in fact overcome the chumps. Maybe that’s what makes the movies tolerable. Her 2000s mumblecore efforts, and the genre in general, are part of the tradition of independent filmmaking, with clear influences in John Cassavetes, Richard Linklater, Chantal Akerman, and they do things that I enjoy about indie movies. They are raw, naturalistic, and honest and allow space for intimacy and intensity to tangle. The plots are so simple you wonder, “Did anything actually happen in that?” The low budgets leave no place to hide.

But the characters, the men in particular, are explicitly annoying. They are embarrassing and they are embarrassed. They are always talking yet rarely manage to say anything. When they do, it’s usually not quite what they meant to say, and probably not how they should’ve said it. They’re messy and unfocused and often work from the outer edge of talent. Looking back from the present, it’s easy to see how their off-handed mutterings and sort-of-jokes might translate to a vaguely funny social media presence in the 2010s—which is exactly what Gerwig’s character in 2015’s Mistress America attempts, and can’t nail down.

This is all the point. Nobody is meant to come away unscathed in those movies. In a 2013 Guardian piece looking back on mumblecore, Gerwig described the process of making them as largely unscripted, communally constructed, and hinged on “shooting hundreds of hours of footage, then putting the most embarrassing stuff in the film.” They present a perspective on relationships between men and women that does feel honest, and they’re important both as an indie movement and in their depiction of mildly ambitious young white artsy adults of the mid-to-late-2000s – I can practically taste the IFC Center popcorn when a Joe Swanberg movie is on my TV – but it’s hard to call them classics. They don’t rise to meet their influences, lacking the style and character of Linklater, the soul of Cassavetes, the commitment of Akerman.

Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2009) gave Gerwig her first script credits, and she also shared directing credit on Nights and Weekends. The look of them is all Swanberg – natural and available light, very regular and slightly sad-looking apartment sets, grainy digital-video closeups – but the stories are driven by Greta. Gerwig plays the titular Hannah, a flighty aspiring playwright who dumps her boyfriend in the hopes of achieving more stability and success. She works for a TV show assisting two writers, and immediately gets entangled with them, despite their few redeeming qualities. If you can believe it, sleeping with her ostensible bosses only makes her more confused about her own life!

In Nights and Weekends, Gerwig and Swanberg play Mattie and James, a couple whose long-distance status has become untenable. When they’re together, they can’t shake the thought that, in a few days, they’ll be apart again. Each recognizes the relationship is failing, so when the opportunity to close the gap between them arises, neither is willing take it. It’s a stronger movie than Hannah, but walks similar ground; it also features frank and unsexy sex, characters flailing in search of a center, and observations about living, working, and loving in the burgeoning digital age that prefer to fall short of revelation or epiphany.

They’re perfect time capsules of the period they sprang from. They’re also criminally awkward movies. Even in that unflattering light, Gerwig’s performances shine through with a clear perspective: I’m a loser, and it’s time to grow up. (The female loser is an underutilized character type, and Gerwig was this century’s reigning champion until Alana Haim snatched the trophy in Licorice Pizza.) The men are obstacles. From the audience’s perspective, the key to her success just may be finding her way past them.

The five years between Hannah and 2012’s Frances Ha saw Gerwig appearing in a variety of movies she was not creatively involved with that had larger productions, bigger names, and wider distributions. She’s the brash friend in The House of the Devil, the kooky love interest in the Arthur remake, the second lead who practically lives in her own universe in Damsels in Distress. Frances Ha is lightyears ahead of what had come before it, but shares a lot of DNA with mumblecore, as if she had to return to it to close out that chapter.

Frances is the ultimate realization of Hannah and Mattie. She’s not just a sketch of a woman, she jumps off the screen as a real, vibrant, ridiculous person. She’s still a loser who spends much of the movie with her foot in her mouth, but with the benefit of a real script – cowritten by her and Noah Baumbach, who also directed – Frances is a character who can make choices and go someplace. She remains surrounded by men who fundamentally do not understand her, but now, they’re friends! The guys, goofy rich kids who share almost no similar concerns with Frances, don’t really understand her, but that’s okay; she likes them just fine at a distance.

Hannah, Mattie, and Frances are always headed away from these men. Toward the next relationship, a better opportunity, an apartment of one’s own. Frances Ha marks the start of Gerwig writing about men who are merely damaged, not insufferable. Their damage is myopic, silly, privileged, and yet they are worthy of attention, friendship, and even love. Her short-term roommates Benji and Lev are bemused by Frances; she doesn’t seem to think about them much at all. She’s not mean, she likes being around them. No matter what else is going wrong in her life, though, Frances does not need their attention or approval. She doesn’t seek their affection.

Brooke, Gerwig’s character in Mistress America, is something new for her, less realistic than the characters of her twenties and more of a broad comedic type, albeit one who still lives in the regular world. Brooke is enchanting, industrious, and popular, a quippy, fast-talking screwball-comedy queen transported from classic talkies to the era of ADHD and social media. Nothing she attempts works out quite right but she’s optimistic and driven, and only sometimes overwhelmed by resentment and bitterness. She’s reeling after being dumped by her offscreen fiancé, yet puts no effort into repairing that relationship, or seeking a new one. Like Frances, some part of Brooke understands that she needs to fix herself first. Her path to self-realization does, however, include an ill-defined restaurant concept.

There’s just one adult man in the movie, the wealthy and buffoonish Dylan, husband to Brooke’s former best friend. Everyone else is a woman or a teenager. (Gerwig so clearly understands and delights in depicting the teenage perspective in Mistress America, you can almost hear Lady Bird bouncing around in her head.) All the characters are honest with Brooke, often more or less wondering How exactly do you live like this? Brooke always takes it in stride, which could easily look like delusion, but Gerwig plays her with supreme confidence. Only Dylan manages to bring her idealism to a slamming halt by giving her a soft-spoken and brutal reality check. She pitches her restaurant and, after some convincing, he agrees to help by giving her money not to open a business, essentially buying her out and flipping her Williamsburg lease. Since they’re business partners, and he’s also taking this opportunity to come on to her, he says they should get a drink in the city sometime.

“I like to drink,” Brooke tells him with a heartbreaking chuckle.

“Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”

“No. No it isn’t.”

For all of her free-spirited magical thinking, Brooke can’t dodge that truth, or tuck it away behind a new scheme.

These characters get less defined by their proximity to men as Gerwig ages and becomes more interested in exploring not just romantic relationship dynamics, but also her relationship with herself and how a woman like her fits in a world like this. She’s consistent, but never repeating herself. That’s part of what makes her writing, directing, and performing so exciting to me. She taking on familiar topics, and always finding something new to say.

—August 20, 2023