And then pulled back the veil on her alleged perfection to reveal her complicated, contradictory humanity.
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Mistress America - the title comes from one of Brooke’s never-to-be-achieved ideas for a TV show about a female superhero - is very much what a story about a manic pixie dream girl might look like if it booted out the mopey guy trailing around after her and let the woman herself take center stage.
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She is a whirlwind of creativity and a fount of possibility with, apparently, no idea how to follow through on anything.
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But it’s absolutely clear from the get-go that if Brooke is a force of nature, she’s more tornado than summer breeze: as wantonly heedless and thoughtlessly cruel as she is confident, as full of herself as she is full of ambition. She is an inspiration to her soon-to-be-stepsister, Tracy (Lola Kirke: Gone Girl), and a prod for the quiet college freshman to get out and experience all the weird wonderfulness that New York City has to offer. Greta Gerwig’s Brooke, in the marvelously fresh and funny Mistress America, isn’t a manic pixie dream girl, at least not in the cardboard barely-there sense that the term usually denotes. If teenaged boys truly do need to be sat down and have it explained to them that girls are actually people coping with their own personal disasters and detours, the way to do that is to let girls tell their stories, not continue to turn them into props for the betterment of boys’ humanity.
The film explicitly excludes the possibility that its story could be about Margo by telling us that whatever is going on with her is “her story to tell.” And Paper Towns has absolutely no interest in telling it. The idea of Margo - not even Margo herself! - fosters and supports Quentin. The problem with Paper Towns - from director Jake Schreier, who made the genuinely charming and funny and insightful Robot & Frank - is that by the time Margo’s MPDGness is debunked, she has already served the precise purpose that MPDGs always do: she is not a person in her own right in the story but a prompt for Quentin to grow and learn and change.
This is not a spoiler, unless the notion that girls are people too comes as a shocking revelation, as it seems to for Quentin. Based on the novel by John Green - who also wrote The Fault in Our Stars, which made for a far more engaging film than this one - Paper Towns thinks it’s all about debunking the myth and the mystery of the manic pixie dream girl, by leading Quentin on a quest to find Margo when she disappears after their “epic adventure,” a quest that ends when he learns that Margo is a messed-up human being, not a “miracle” and not a fantasy object for him. Infuriatingly, this is intended as a feature of this parade of forced charm and dreary adolescent angst, not a bug. Margo might be the most manic, most pixie, most dreamy manic pixie dream girl ever. (Plus, they live in Orlando, which is not the most thrilling place on Earth.) Gosh, boring ol’ Quentin is gonna be so transformed by Margo’s joie de vivre and quirky mysteriousness! Margo (Cara Delevingne: The Face of an Angel, Anna Karenina) is prone to wearing black nail polish and saying things like “I’m a big believer in random capitalization” and climbing into the bedroom window of Quentin (Nat Wolff: The Fault in Our Stars, Palo Alto) in the middle of the night to take him on an “epic adventure” that she promises will be “the best night of your life.” And it is, because even though this epic night is mostly taken up with pranks on the level of toilet-papering someone’s house, they’re only 17 years old they haven’t done much. Lonely, misunderstood teen - a boy, of course - discovers life and adventure and excitement via kooky gorgeous “miracle” neighbor: who is a girl, of course.