Near the end of Noah Baumbach’s lightly enchanting “Frances Ha,” the title character and her best friend Sophie are lying next to each other. Frances is anxious to get her wayward soul mate back from a fiancé; Sophie is drunk and honest. We’re heading for a moment. And then: a running gag about wearing socks in bed.
Baumbach often rings the doorbell of profundity but then runs away before anyone answers. There are a hundred finely lathed one-liners in this effervescent film about a 27-year-old dancer (Greta Gerwig) trying to make it in New York. But they don’t really form a structure and they’re more amusing than funny: I laughed about six times. This black-and-white movie is aggressively, weirdly (considering Baumbach’s career in writing blockbusters like “Madagascar 3”) low-budget, and the DIY ethos extends all the way to a script that eschews depth or meaning. To put it another way: This is “Girls” minus the dark stuff.
That luminescent indie she-sprite, Greta Gerwig (who co-wrote the script with Baumbach, her boyfriend,) is at her winsome finest as Frances, who often refers to her bestie Sophie (an intriguing Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting) as “the same person with different hair.” Inseparable since college, they share a friendship so rich and satisfying that they literally (but not metaphorically) sleep together.
Interesting problem, as each of them has a boyfriend. For a while, the picture seems as if it’s going to explore how the love between straight people of the same sex can be more intoxicating than any romantic relationship (the same idea gave “Superbad” poignancy), but then Sophie slides out of the picture and Baumbach and Gerwig switch to issues of money, careers and maturity. Only the children of the rich, Sophie observes astutely, “can afford to be artists in New York.” Frances’ poverty-tourist roommates possess an Eames chair and can afford a maid).
This second idea might be even more intriguing, but Baumbach drops that one, too, making the movie largely a catalogue of Frances’ cute failures (on a sudden trip to Paris, she’s so lost for something to do that she goes to see “Puss in Boots”) plus some banter with a possible new boyfriend, a writer (Michael Zegen) who seems more like a little brother than a potential lover.
RELATED: HOW GRETA GERWIG IS CHANNELING HER INNER DIANE KEATON
We get the sense that it’ll all work out for Frances, which is comforting. But despite the indomitable Gerwigian charm the character is barely on the right side of cliché — a manic pixie dream girl twirling her way through youth.
Baumbach seems mainly interested in capturing the whimsical rhythms of unformed post-college life, with money too scarce and roommates too ample — but he already did that, did it better and with more rueful feeling, in the much funnier “Kicking and Screaming,” the debut he made at 25 and one of the best films of the 1990s.
Is it too much to hope that, at 43, Baumbach (who in the meantime made the excellent “The Squid and the Whale” and “Margot at the Wedding,” then the prickly “Greenberg”) would have more to say than he does here, where people say of themselves, “I’m so embarrassed — I’m not a real person yet”? Someone notes that nobody ever says “I’m not here to make friends” except on reality TV. Perspicacious and wry — but the line isn’t hilarious, it’s thrown out randomly (by a background character of no consequence) and like most of the one-liners it has nothing to do with anything.
Baumbach’s wit is not to be dismissed — “Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to get your attention” is self-contradiction worthy of Oscar Wilde — but it’s not enough, either. A character in a novel by Baumbach’s fellow Gen-Xer Bret Easton Ellis ruminates despondently on the U2 lyric, “We’ll slide down the surface of things.” Frances might add, “And then let’s go get ice cream!”
Follow @rkylesmith on Twitter for the latest movie news and reviews.