CHICAGO – Excelsior! Comic book legend Stan Lee’s famous exclamation puts a fine point on the third and final play of Mark Pracht’s FOUR COLOR TRILOGY, “The House of Ideas,” presented by and staged at City Lit Theater in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. For tickets/details, click HOUSE OF IDEAS.
Film Review: ‘Mistress America’ Ultimately Wears Out Her Welcome
CHICAGO – “Mistress America” is a movie that works best in small doses. The film is chock-full of special moments, lines, and fragments of scenes, but it never really comes together as a cohesive film. I could see it easily taking on a second life once it hits streaming and YouTube.
Rating: 3.0/5.0 |
As a 30-second distillation of a funny thought, idea, or insight it’s actually quite charming. The script by star Greta Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach has scores of quotable dialogue and beautifully written windows into a specific type of literary ennui, and the anxiety of trying to find your place in the world – but taken en masse it’s more exhausting than liberating.
Part of that is due to Gerwig’s character. She’s a 30-year-old motormouth and seemingly flighty at the same time, imparting both big personal bombshells and wild harebrained schemes in the same offhand way that she describes excitement about a new frozen yogurt machine. She is shallowly exciting in very small doses, and she’s just what her 18 year-old soon to be stepsister (Lola Kirke) needs.
Kirke portrays a lonely college freshman away from home in New York City. She makes a friend (Matthew Shear) in the forges of mutual rejection after they’re both left out of a prestigious literary society, but it is Gerwig seems to be the one who is living life to the fullest. She projects an image of being a young girl in the know who knows all the best clubs and all the fun parties, and all the right people, but it is merely the facade that covers her own emptiness. She is still striving for success, but doesn’t really have it, so she clings to youth and embraces Kirke as a sister in arms. For her part Kirke idolizes her, but sees through her to the longing inside.
Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke in ‘Mistress America’
Photo credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures