Frances Ha

Summer movies usually equate to “popcorn” movies: these movies are easily digestible due to their very familiar themes and arcs, and can range from your run of the mill romantic comedy to your next comic book adaptation. It’s all a lot of fun, but as we roll into the end of July, these movies start to feel less cozy and just more mundane. However, as we still dwell in smash-hit summer and don’t want to quite plunge into arthouse autumn,  our appetites are wet for a change in perspective yet we still desire some easy watching. Finding that happy medium can be difficult, but it is perfectly balanced in Frances Ha.

The story follows an aspiring dancer Frances (Greta Gerwig, Damsels in Distress, To Rome with Love) desperately trying to get a grasp upon her life. As she sees her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) begin to move on with her life, Frances scrambles to not be left in the dust.  

Much like other popcorn films, Frances Ha takes root in an already popular genre; quirkxplotation. With the success of shows like New Girl and the MPDG movement in general, Frances Ha fits into the mold of that jovial, off-beat personality that is so inviting to audiences. However, the film far from embodies the genre.

Co-written by Gerwig herself, Frances does live her life with whimsicality, but also carries much anxiety in her shoulders as the impending mortality of her youth hangs above her. Far from an MPDG, Frances graduates to a fully realized character with flying colors.

Director and co-writer Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg) heavily borrows both narrative and aesthetics from Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Woody Allen’s Manhattan. The black and white cinematography perfectly encapsulates the romanticism of the urban landscape as well as a nostalgic flare. Frances Ha also does not tether itself so a strict narrative structure, seeming more like a modern art photo gallery. While Truffaut and Allen were both masters of their craft, their arthouse aesthetics and high culture laden dialogue can made them alienating to a wider audience. Frances Ha does not fall victim to this flaw.

Frances Ha has a bit of an arthouse exterior, but the inner core hits the heart of universal themes: evolution of friendships, anxiety of adulthood, aimless sense of identity, and pathways to self expression. The film is quick and precise; cutting through the fat of any exclusionary practices.

Ultimately, the inviting quality was carried through by Greta Gerwig’s electric performance. Her enthusiasm and charm create an enjoyable film for a movie lover’s summer diet and makes it impossible for a viewer not to become invested in the trials of Frances. For any naysayers, you can just say “ha” to their face.            

Leisure Time: Manic Pixie Dream Girls

She is ethereal and girlish, with societal standards falling off her like the rain when she’s out puddle-jumping. Her quirky and offbeat behavior brings out the best both in people and in life. If she has any flaws, they only make her more endearing. She is the problematic and oh-so-cute Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG).

Film critic Nathan Rabin, who first coined the term, defined Manic Pixie Dream Girls as women who exist “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

She is a narrative device who stops the arrested development of the downtrodden and repressed male protagonist and convinces him to live a little.

The gendered implications of this are severe. The MPDG premise is more than just “quirky girl jumps into man’s life and makes it more magical”; it’s a timeworn plot tactic that idealizes a woman until she loses her human side, making her merely a tool.

While Rabin originally coined the term to describe Kirsten Dunst’s unbelievably chipper flight attendant in “Elizabethtown,” the trope has since been retroactively applied to tons of characters: Sam in “Garden State,” Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Allison in “Yes Man,” Susan Vance in “Bringing Up Baby,” and many more, depending on your definition.

In all these films we see women reduced to a catalyst for men’s changes rather than a personality in her own right — akin to the femme fatale of the noir era, but with laughs and a happy ending.

But the key word is “dream.” She’s not a real representation of a woman or romantic partner.

Ironically, many of these movies are aimed at a female audience, normally through a “romantic comedy” premise. But these movies are typically male-centric, only exploring the male side of the relationship in any depth. The consequence is that the audience identifies with the male protagonist, reinforcing and reestablishing the submissive female stereotype.

On the other side of this relationship we get equally uninspired characters in the leading men. They are bland, purposeless, and (often) depressed men, whose lives are only “completed” once they start dating an MPDG. Their relationships become the ultimate key to happiness in their lives, in which things only have meaning if they have girls on their arms.

“He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt said of his character in “(500) Days of Summer.” “A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.”

The archetype defines women by the ideas and images in the minds of others. She has no ups or downs, she never deals with the scary and more actual issues that real girls deal with; she is the idea of an ideal woman, the quirk without the context.

The people and relationships presented in these films are unsustainable, and the brief window captured in their life neglects to point this out. Recently there has been a push in films like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “(500) Days of Summer,” and “Ruby Sparks” with meta-exploration that exposes the essentially flawed trope.

Although similarly from the male perspective, they explore how one-sided the presentation of relationships in film can be. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Joel states he still believed Clem would save his life, even though she specifically said, “Too many guys think I’m a concept or I’m going to complete them, or I’m going to make them alive.”

By the end of the film both Clem and Joel have grown as characters who now better accept each other, flaws and all. “Ruby Sparks” and “(500) Days of Summer” also show us how destructive and inconsiderate these relationships can become if both partners are portrayed two-dimensionally. No real person is as basic as the ones we find dancing through MPDG plot lines.

These unrealistic characters, in turn, create unreal standards for anyone who thinks that the perfect mate will fix your problems that easily. If life really does imitate art, then writers need to stop dreaming.

[illustration credit: Kay Kim]

Ruby Sparks

“That bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”  

The term Manic Pixie Dream Girl was first used by film critic Nathan Rabin in 2005 to describe quirky females used only as romantic interests and plot devices to help the arrested development of a male protagonist.  This is a character trope not new or novel to the cinematic world ranging from Sugar in Some Like it Hot, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Sam in Garden State.  In Ruby Sparks, writer Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano, There Will Be Blood, Little Miss Sunshine) has hit a slump since his first and only novel.  His writer’s block is soon ameliorated through his vivid dreams of a bubbly and stunning woman (Zoe Kazan, happythankyoumoreplease, Me and Orson Welles, And the Writer of Ruby Sparks!)  Soon the galloping thunder of a typewriter fills the air and Calvin novelizes his dream girl; dubbing her Ruby Sparks.  Calvin starts to fall for his muse, only to find one morning that has she come to life.

This premise reeks of a MPDG, meaning a film with flat female characters and the idealization of women; that women only serve to save men from the pity of their own despair.  While Ruby Sparks starts in this fashion, it finds itself usurping this trope.  Ruby is everything Calvin could hope for; because he wrote her.  However, soon Ruby—just as real women would—begins to yearn for a life beyond a relationship; desiring personal growth and exploration.  No matter how much Calvin wishes to bend Ruby to his whim, she only becomes hilariously caricature.  While the ending of the movie may be a bit cutesy, the film ultimately takes us down a journey that maybe everyone should go through. It asks us to explore, work, and ultimately—and most importantly—see people. For everything they are, might be, and can be.

In the end, the MPDG is one of those tropes that is inherently flawed. The film gives us the archetypical MPDG and cleverly critiques it to the point that Ruby is no longer just a trope, but a real character.  Calvin is punished for buying into such naive fantasies, ultimately breaking from his adolescent mindset.  Ruby is no longer the MPDG, but in the end serves the same purpose as an MPDG, meaning did she ever really depart from the trope?  Either way, the ever self-aware Ruby Sparks manipulates, affirms, and deconstructs the MPDG, transcending its mundane purposes and fleshes out the honest incorrectness behind idealization and the organically dynamic nature of relationships.  

Ruby Sparks delights; it entertains and asks questions of its audience and relationships. The film naturally progresses itself in the same way a relationship would, and as viewers follow Calvin down his journey with Ruby what they end up with is a witty film that manages to charm and captivate, while still discussing themes greater than itself.  Truly, a work of fiction come to life.