I Miss/Missed Greta

Greta Gerwig is one of those actresses that seems to be in every movie that I pick up these days.  It’s not like I’m looking for movies that she’s in.  She just somehow, someway seems to appear in the film that I’m watching.  I’m sort of having the same thing with Mark Duplass.  He just keeps popping up in every other movie I pick up and it’s normally a bit of a shock to me since I didn’t realize that he was even in a lot of films to begin with.

I have to admit that Greta Gerwig fascinates me.  She’s certainly an attractive woman but not one that I would call the typical drop dead gorgeous type that we tend to see a lot in cinema.  I have a kind of funny connection to her.  I think, if you could have peered inside my brain when I was 17 years old, she is probably the *picture* of the woman that I thought that I would someday marry.  I don’t actually mean Greta herself, mind you, but someone who more or less looks like her, acts like her characters, and so on.  When I watch movies with her in it, it fills me with an uncanny feeling, like I’ve met her before or that I really do know her.  It’s a bit eerie and soothing at the same time.

 

Greta Gerwig in "Lola Versus"

Gerwig tends to play characters that are sort of socially and sometimes physically awkward, flat footed, self conscious, and often suffering from self esteem issues, and yet she does it all with a sort of grace and charm that I find irresistible.  In essence, that’s the sort of woman that I always thought I would marry.  Does that sound a bit strange?  I’ll bet it does.  It probably speaks volumes about my own self perception.

Whereas I admire a Michelle Williams and occasionally drool over an Ashley Greene, neither of these seem very tangible to me.  Audrey Tautou positively puts a smile on my face like no other and Juliette Binoche is nearly the essence of my fantasies.  And yet, if you put me in a room and asked me to choose from all of the above, I think I’d still opt for Greta.  There’s just a comfort there that’s non-existent in the other options.  Again, tangible, comfortable, but yet still fascinating and mildly puzzling.  I guess that's what it takes.