Director: Noah Baumbach
Year released: 2010
It's kind of a hackneyed cliche at this point but I'm going to trot it out there because it fits; I wanted to like this one more than I did. I just found myself being overwhelmed by my dislike for the title character, to the point where there was little else that I could even remember after it was over. And there's certainly a whole lot to like, as A.O. Scott points out in his review that was originally published in the March 24, 2010 edition of the New York Times. Still in all, a good little movie and certainly not a waste of time watching it.
“Hurt people hurt people.” This nugget of therapy talk is passed from one character to another in Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg," offered as an explanation, an excuse and a sort-of apology. While those four words don’t quite sum up the whole of the human condition, they might stand as a concise summary of Mr. Baumbach’s recent movies. The battling pair of married (and then divorced) writers in "The Squid and the Whale," the warring sisters in "Margot at the Wedding"--they and their loved ones walk through life nursing psychic wounds and brandishing metaphorical knives. Roger Greenberg--a former musician who works as a carpenter and whose vocation is writing eloquent letters of complaint about apparently minor inconveniences — is both heavily scarred and heavily armed. Played by Ben Stiller as a wiry, gray-haired ball of raw nerves and well-oiled defense mechanisms, Roger returns to Los Angeles after 15 years in New York and a short stay in a mental hospital after a breakdown. He roosts in the large hillside house of his brother (Chris Messina), who has gone with his wife and children to Vietnam for a long vacation.
“I’m trying to do nothing right now,” Roger explains to everyone who doesn’t ask. Whether he succeeds is an open question. He looks up some old friends, worries about the neighbors and his brother’s dog, and pursues an awkward stop-and-start romance with his brother’s personal assistant, Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig). Roger, at 40, seems uncomfortably stuck in his own receding youth, but Florence, who hangs out in art galleries with her friends and sometimes sings at a half-empty hipster bar, really is 25.
Although Roger Greenberg is a world-class narcissist, “Greenberg” is not all about him. It is the funniest and saddest movie Mr. Baumbach has made so far, and also the riskiest. Mr. Stiller, suppressing his well-honed sketch comedian’s urge to wink at the audience, turns Roger into a walking challenge to the Hollywood axiom that a movie’s protagonist must be likable. But Mr. Baumbach, relishing his antihero’s obstinate difficulty--which is less an inability to connect with other people than a stubborn refusal, on hazy grounds of principle, to try--treats Roger with compassion, even tenderness.
And in finding others who are willing, sometimes against their best interests, to venture that kind of generosity, he turns what might have been a case study of neurosis into an exploration of loneliness, friendship and the sense of emotional deprivation that can fester in a landscape of comfort and privilege.
This landscape is an important part of the film, as is the city of Los Angeles, captured in its shaggy, smoggy, unglamorous beauty by the exceptionally talented cinematographer Harris Savides. The easiest rebuke to aim at Mr. Baumbach, the child of East Coast literary intellectuals and the husband of a much-admired actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who appears in “Greenberg” and shares a story credit with her husband), is that he occupies himself with a narrow and (to him) familiar swath of social reality. Fair enough, but so did Henry James. And like James — I swear I won’t push this analogy too far, lest I start sounding like the dad in “The Squid and the Whale” — Mr. Baumbach is highly sensitive to nuances of behavior and tiny distinctions of status.
To some extent, “Greenberg,” like nearly all of Mr. Baumbach’s work going back to "Kicking and Screaming" is a comedy of manners. West Coast versions of the hyper-articulate recent college graduates of that movie, his 1995 directing debut, have grown up and been supplanted by a strange new generation. Some of the humor in “Greenberg” comes from the various collisions between youth and middle age. Kids these days! They don’t know what you’re talking about when you quote "Wall Street" and they don’t appreciate Duran Duran. Damned Internet!
Roger drifts partly back into a circle of old friends and band mates, and seeks out Beth (Ms. Leigh), a former girlfriend who has been married and divorced since he saw her last. She, like Roger’s still loyal best friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), has been attempting to live an adult life, and several scenes capture the awkwardness of people trying to hold on to their youth and trying to find a comfortable way to be grown-ups. (By drinking beer, for example, at their children’s birthday parties.)
You don’t have the feeling that Ivan or Beth has changed much since the mid-’90s, but each has accepted the necessity of compromise. This is a basic element of maturity that Roger refuses. Beth and Ivan are trying to swim, or at least are managing to tread water, while Roger can barely dog paddle his way out of the shallow end of his brother’s pool.
It is partly arrested development--the refusal to act his age--that draws Roger to Florence, who functions less as a standard love interest than as his mirror image and moral counterweight. Like Roger, she is lonely and adrift, but her identity crisis is different from his. While he is aggressive even at times of indecision, Florence, at her most decisive, still seems tentative and hesitant.
“You need to stand up for yourself,” Florence’s employer tells her, and Roger, who takes repeated advantage of her passivity, mistakes it for low self-esteem. “You have value,” he tells her at one point, repeating another therapeutic nostrum he picked up from Beth.
“I already knew that,” Florence shouts back, in a rare display of anger. “You didn’t have to say that.”
Her problem is that she is not sure what or who else should have value to her. Florence is in the early stages of the battle for love and success, having taken her marching orders along with her college degree. But she has only a vague sense of the mission.
Roger, meanwhile, fancies himself a conscientious objector, courageously refusing to follow the rules of engagement and showering contempt on anyone who does. This gives him license to be thoughtless and mean whenever he wants, and his repeated, unprovoked cruelty to Florence may be, for some viewers, impossible to forgive.
But “Greenberg” is not easily forgotten, and the misery of Roger’s company provides its own special kind of pleasure. Mr. Baumbach’s sense of character and place is so precise — the film seems so transparent, so real — that his formal audacity almost passes unnoticed. Rather than push Roger and Florence through the grinding machinery of an overdetermined plot, he allows them to wander and sometimes to stall, to inhabit their lives fully and uneasily. They are more like characters in a French movie than the people you usually meet under the Hollywood sign.
Only at the end, in the wake of a brilliantly executed party sequence--in which Roger, the solitary Gen-Xer, finds his world of defensive ironies and carefully preserved pop cultural references overrun and trashed by a swarm of Millennials--does his arc, as residents of Hollywood might call it, become apparent. Mr. Baumbach abruptly, and with a subtle display of self-conscious wit, reveals “Greenberg” to have been a romantic comedy all along. Here we are in a car speeding toward the airport and what might be the prospect of a happy ending. And suddenly a movie about a man who is defiantly difficult to like becomes very hard not to love.
Year released: 2008
