Tim here, hoping that we're all okay with talking about Greta Gerwig a little bit more. The 29-year-old actress and her career has been discussed to the point of distraction throughout the internet ever since she erupted onto the indie scene in 2006 and 2007 in a pair of Joe Swanberg films, LOL and Hannah Takes the Stairs, but on the eve of her new collaboration with director Noah Baumbach, Frances Ha, it seemed the right moment to take stock of where her short but impressively-stocked career has taken her so far. It's also a great moment to look head-on at the question that has hung around the new film like a shroud: is Frances Ha going to be Gerwig’s “breakout” film, the one that finally makes her a movie star?
My feeling, without having seen the movie (where I live in Chicago, it's not opening for a while yet) is that it almost certainly won't. And that's not something that people who love the actress need to feel very bad about, either.
Let's clear out the low-hanging fruit first: star-making turns tend to happen in movies that many people see, and like. Even with the consensus emerging that Frances Ha is less curdled than anything else Baumbach has yet made (which, even speaking as a fan of his work, isn't a particularly high bar to clear), it's only like to meet that standard: it's still a black-and-white movie with hardly any overarching dramatic plot, and most viewers who live outside of cities won't have a chance to see it in a theater. The kind of people apt to hunt the film out probably already know who Gerwig is; they probably already like her. It might very well graduate her from the status of "promising talent" to "top-notch, reliable actor whose films are always worth seeing", but it's not likely to seriously raise Gerwig's profile outside the self-selecting indie film audience that already knows who she is, if only from Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress and Baumbach's own Greenberg.
Really, why should it? Gerwig herself doesn't seem to be terribly interested in becoming a household name, based on the decisions she's made. The one and only outright mainstream films of her career were both in the first third of 2011: a tiny role in No Strings Attached, and the Arthur remake, neither of which worked out very well for anyone involved. Other than that, the closest she's come to anything "big" has been taking one of the worst-written roles in the weakest segment of Woody Allen's anthology film To Rome with Love, which surely had more to do with the opportunity to work with Allen than anything that involved raising her profile outside of her niche.
Gerwig, I suspect, is just one of those performers for whom working exclusively on a small scale is intimately linked with what makes those of us in her fan club like her. Consider the chief elements of her acting persona, as it's been established so far (naturalism and "real" style notwithstanding, she absolutely has a clear-cut persona as solid and consistent as any movie star of the '30s): self-consciousness, arrogance masquerading as humility, articulate and crisp line readings married to body language that feels like she ought to be mumbling and fuzzy. There are few more distinctive performers working in American cinema right now, nor many whose itchy self-awareness is more bracing (unless you dislike her, in which case it's probably just pointlessly indulgent), and it's impossible to imagine that a version of Gerwig working to any larger audience, with the larger budget and higher responsibility that implies, being able to maintain that. It's the easiest thing in the world to imagine her taking a little showcase part in a big movie - Kat Dennings's character in Thor would have been an easy fit for her. But who can honestly claim that it would be interesting to watch Gerwig doing something like that? Her instincts as an actor are so tight and small, refusing to demand attention in a larger context: even in a "mainstream" film as small-scale as To Rome with Love, she's so retiring as to be almost completely lost.
There's a common hope among fans of the more obscure artists, that they're just one big break away from everybody else understanding those in the know saw all along. But certain performers thrive only in a very specific environment (as when Tilda Swinton, having won her Oscar, immediately re-dedicated herself to the business of making Tilda Swinton films), and for Greta Gerwig, urbane American indies are plainly where she does best. Her singularly idiosyncratic vision of female identity is exactly the kind of thing that would get scrubbed out first if she ever did manage to end up in even a medium-budget studio film, where complex characters of any gender are frowned on and complex women in particular are avoided like the plague.
By all means, I hope that Frances Ha is seen and beloved by everybody. But I hope even more that it doesn’t change anything. Gerwig is too great in her little under-seen indies; working with directors Baumbach and Stillman, people with tiny, claustrophobic, pointedly non-commercial worldviews has worked out to her absolute benefit, finding other artists whose closed-off weirdness harmonizes well with her own. There are very few performers who can find a niche that feeds their creativity as well as Gerwig has, and the defiantly intimate and narrow scope of her career to date is as rewarding as anything else in American independent cinema in a generation. Indie film needs her, and whatever happens with Frances Ha, indie film, I suspect, is where she’ll stay.
