"Miss America": How Greta Gerwig Became the Heroine of Our Time
"No one likes duplicates, but it happens that you make them at least twenty. Ten is just a routine, on the 15th duplicate you begin to invent something, after the 20th something new appears in the scene that was not there before, "says actress Greta Gerwig in an interview to director Sarah Polly. Grete thirty two, she has an infectious and warm smile, wrinkles around her eyes from the habit of constantly smiling and blond hair, each time she talks about work so heartfelt, funny and excited, as if giving an interview for the first time in her life. Yes, this conversation is not like an interview : rather the child behaves like this, who was puzzled by the question m: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” After a few minutes of fascinated observation of gestures and mimicry Gerwig, it becomes clear how she manages to play the 20th double as the first — inadvertently, gently, passing, suddenly discovering all her possibilities, not a second without looking at the reaction of others. Yes, the audience is always there, but playing a show for them is to deceive themselves.
With the roles of Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman and Woody Allen, with two scenarios for Mila Frances and a fresh Miss America, Greta Gerwig is the new brightest star of American cinema, for which you want to watch continuously in real time. "Kind and fearless," as she characterizes her character from Miss America. Gervig in the frame is life itself with its ups and downs, with the struggle for the right word at the right time, groping and a bewildered smile in any incomprehensible situation. She seems to be a self-taught and courageous girl from the area where the heroes of Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith grew up, could be Annie Hall’s daughter and Holly Golightly’s granddaughter, but most importantly, she’s a living person with an uncertain future, whose struggle is taking place in your eyes and ends unknownly what a score. Greta Gerwig has been in the movies for almost ten years, but most of her early films have been seen by very few people: an American independent mumblecore with a shaky camera, a loser's pose and hypertrophied mediocre characters who often cannot get the whole movie off the couch and leave the house - not that a movie with which you usually want to relax in a cinema (and even many of her films have not reached cinemas). To watch mumblecore without disappointment, you need to be patient with the list of heroes' imperfections, the staging and the script, in which there is nothing but constant chatter around the bush for any reason. At the tenth minute, you really think that you are spending a day off with your not-beloved friends, who haven’t set a day.
Gerwig admits that she never got sick with mumblecore, but at the beginning of her career, she went to the shooting of Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers, because she had little theater, and this was the only door to the world of cinema, barely ajar, which could be hidden by everyone. . Out of nearly a dozen exercise films, she, as an actress, got used to herself in the frame and realized herself, felt the filming process on the set, learned to improvise and invent on the go. Behind her shoulders, Gerwig had a prestigious Barnard College, ballet and fencing classes, tap dance, stage movement, and several acting classes. In Brooklyn, an inflated mattress was waiting for her in the entrance room of friends and a bag of unassembled things, and in Northern California - a family you cannot return to for good, but you can come to visit for Thanksgiving and feel like a 16-year-old again.
A few years ago, Greta Gerwig was no different from the thousands of wannabe artists who come to New York or Los Angeles for fame and year after year fill up the bar counters and cash registers of supermarkets, flashing in small roles. Someone is very lucky, someone for years waiting for the fateful meeting with Spielberg, until finally forget about the dream with which he came. “I would have done it anyway, even if I had been alone,” says Greta about her breakthrough in the cinema, which happened in her career after meeting Noa Baumbakh. She met him at the site of the film "Greenberg" in 2010, began to meet and jointly wrote two scripts for herself in the lead role.
As it is impossible to understand where Diane Keaton ends in “Annie Hall”, and where Woody Allen begins, so in two great films of the main contemporary New Yorker Baumbakh it is not clear what comes from Gerwig and what he invented himself. Frequently asked by journalists "How do you work together?" they both tell how a note on the table turns into an idea, an idea into a heroine, the heroine clings to the scenes in scenes, and the letter in the mail written between the cases contains the perfect ending. Relationships on the site have become a novel, letters of love - letters of work, and in general - a bit of everything. It seems that not to meet Baumbach Gervig, he would have had all chances to become a smart bored girl, and Gervig without Baumbakh would have waited too long for a film where they fearlessly entrust the main role: in Hollywood there are too many actresses of her age who need a sparkling, passionate and loud best friend with a funny attractive face.
Each generation of American filmmakers rewinds the story of the American Dream in a new way, and Annie Hall, Tess McGill, Sally or Carrie Bradshaw, who rolls her eyes whenever she needs to take a taxi through the Brooklyn Bridge, have little in common with girls who come to New York. York right now. They should not be frightened by rats running across the street, and they should not be embarrassed by a boarded up door in an apartment that they illegally rent. They go to the capital of the world without hope of meeting a writer in Greenwich Village and do not count on an affair with a colleague. They are not interested in sex with a longtime friend, and their thoughts are more likely to take a dubious investment in Mom's home cafe, where you can get a haircut, than a message from Mr. Big. These girls often feel like loners at a party of strangers, knock about and spend almost all their strength to never give up, and independently search for new ones without being raided by provincialism. Let's be honest, by and large the American dream has never been a house in Ohio or a vineyard in the Napa Valley, but remained the same lights of a big city aimed at a radiant lady.
Gerwig and Baumbach paint a world where dreamers live, not tired of trying new things with zero guarantees
This lady ran for several years and knocked on all the doors in a row and no one except her, after all, had to know that she had not attended college, and the balance on her account had been fluctuating around zero for half a year already. Love in her list of necessary long ago gave way to ambition. It is no coincidence that in two films written by Gerwig along with Baumbakh, the guys are not just poboku: they do not even appear on the billboards of films. On the posters - girls dancing and walking together hand in hand somewhere ahead, solving the main puzzle of their transitional age - how to reconcile with itself. Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham are shooting and talking about the same girls and their important years, but it is Greta Gerwig who collected from the common areas one movie hero from flesh and blood with characteristics that the characters need to live. in memory after the movie ended. How is Francis there now? Still dancing? Did Brooke move to Los Angeles or still live in a strange place in downtown? The heroines of the comedies Gerwig and Baumbach Francis Ha and Brooke Cardinas in the main and minor things are written off from the girls from the stories of Truman Capote and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. A charming child, a stormy flight, a long wait, early success. They rather evaporate than admit that they have nothing to pay for a taxi, achieve the impossible, but can lose face in a jiffy, appear on the threshold because they have nowhere else to go, but the next morning they are determined to tear the world into pieces. Such a girl - first Francis, then Brooke, and, it seems, still a little Greta - of those who started five alarm clocks the day before to wake up early and have time for everything, but still overslept and now in a panic trying to live the day for good reason.
As the hero of "Rashmore" Max Fisher with his long list of extracurricular activities, the new Miss America in the cinema has a list of dubious and incompatible achievements: a dancer and a choreographer, but a little secretary, and now also the designer of T-shirts, bestsellers, designer of the lobby of a fashionable epilation salon, vocalist in a non-professional group and restaurateur. "The drama club, the circle on the photo, the horror circle - I sing the hunt": multitasking heroines Gerwig is a nightmare for any business partner: she is busy with several things at once, constantly reborn from chaos, wants to do everything, apparently, does not know how to do anything but incredibly learns quickly in the process. Many people with such characteristics are really lucky, and Brooke Cardinas tries to interpret reality as a libertarian: you can “sell yourself” at a higher price, because there is nothing more tempting than sincere and burning enthusiasm.
Mrs. America (in the original - Mistress, but in the Russian box office she is translated as "Miss." - Note ed.) - the heroine of comics, which comes up with Brooke (another idea for her investor) - during the day she works as a civil servant, and at night she turns into a superwoman with super power. Baumbach and Gerwig paint the capitalist and schizophrenic world, where dreamers live, not tired of trying new things with zero guarantees. "Do not take in the literary society, go and create your own society," - says Brooke his ward Tracy in the film "Miss America". Exactly the same inspirational and confident expression was in Gerwig in the Whit Stillman movie “Girls in Danger”, where her character Violet led the depression club on the university campus and threw imperatives at followers. When you become a mentor, there is nowhere to retreat and you have to stay more confident and stronger than you really are.
Greta Gerwig says that she is not very similar to the heroines she plays, but she understands and knows the people from whom they were written off. Those who wander around the big cities in search of lost time and opportunities, in some days shy away from their own shadows and pack their things to escape, while others become the center of the party and role-playing model. Only Gerwig knows how many times it is necessary to rewrite and replay the scene, so that everyone around it seems that there is no film and the role is more direct, simpler and more honest. We believe her and believe that even after the film, Francis continues to dance, and Brooke will not stop dreaming about a restaurant, because Greta Gerwig conveys his sincere faith in a good ending: when you get tired of working, you can just be patient and then suffer and work It also seems that Francis, Brooke and Greta together believe that everything necessary for happiness has long been sitting in front of our noses and waiting for us to pay attention to it. And there are no important years, there is only the important now.
Photo: Pine District Pictures, RT Features, Scott Rudin Productions, Westerly Films