'Frances Ha' star Greta Gerwig is always worth watching
Greta Gerwig is a big, gawky actress who is also, paradoxically, quite lithe. She seems to have replaced Parker Posey as the “It” girl of the indies. She manages to turn her klutziness into a kind of grace.
As Frances, the dithering, knockabout, perpetually put-upon heroine of Noah Baumbach ’s “Frances Ha,” Gerwig is worth watching even when her scenes fall flat. Frances is a struggling dancer who spends much of the movie moving in and out of digs in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Westchester . She’s always on the go and yet never quite going anywhere. Even when she takes a whirlwind sojourn to Paris, she might as well be slumming in Soho.
Baumbach, who also co-wrote the script with Gerwig (his romantic partner), has a loose improvisatory feel for funky comedy. In the scenes with Frances’s best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), the film seems especially true to the nature of female friendships. It’s a skimpy, overextended riff, but some of the seemingly tossed-off moments are lovely. Grade: B (Rated R for sexual references and language.)
