What’s Good: Noah Baumbach manages to make his most dramatic film also his funniest. He just gets better and better. And speaking of better, this is one of the year’s best.
What’s Not:People who don’t “get” Greenberg. Actually I can understand why this film would turn people off. Museum crashing Stiller fans need not apply because this is not the kind of Stiller comedy you may be expecting. Also, while I usually hate hearing from critics (in any way and about petty much anything) I included the AO Scott review of ”Greeberg” from recently dead At the Movies show because Scott is one of the few critics to give “Greenberg” the credit it deserves.
“Greenberg” is out! Usually DVD/Blu-ray releases don’t interest me but this bit of news is an event and a reason to celebrate. I haven’t been very into movies this year for the simple reason that none of them are really worth writing about. Actually I’ve just been really lazy when it comes to writing, talking about movies, going out to movies or for that matter leaving my apartment. But, still, on top of that is the fact that movies have been sucking. Hard. Except for “Greenberg.” Seven months into the year and “Greenberg” is still the best thing out. I usually hold that personal info close to the vest so as to give my year end top ten some heat //term used ironically// but this year is so uneventful that I must appreciate the one great film of 2010 because I may not get another chance to do so after “The Last Airbender” gives me a brain aneurysm and kills me right where I sit.
From “Greenberg” to this month’s solid but not particularly earth shattering ”Cyrus,” man-baby movies are very in right now. These are movies about or featuring men so selfish and entitled that the world must meet their every selfish demand or feel their totally powerless wrath. More often than not, in a movie like “Step Brothers” or “Cyrus,” men literally act like babies (to comic effect) and have a whole lot of mommy issues whereas in a film like “Greenberg” it’s more a part of the behavioral makeup of the character. Somehow we are able to like such characters played by top man baby actors John C. Riley, Ben Stiller and of course the biggest man baby of them all, perhaps even the inventor of modern man babyisms, Will Ferrell who, to his credit, seems to be channeling the classic literary man baby progenitor Ignatius from “A Confederacy of Dunces.” This character type rings true for a lot of reasons, the topmost of which might be that male adults these days are indeed trapped in an infantilized, womb like haze of me-me-me self entitlement. Which brings me to the film at hand. “Greenberg” provides the most incisive, biting, funny and most dramatic treatment of this popular new cultural trope.
It’s kinda sad when you see a deliberately unlikable character and think to yourself that it could be you in ten years if you don’t stop what you’re doing right now and get some therapy. Greenberg is a character that has given up on life and success and happiness yet still desperately wants attention, validation and credit. He’s a walking conflict. This is a character that hates growing older while at the same time also hates the young and energetic. When his ever patient best friend played by Rhys Ifans exhaustively rehashes that Oscar Wilde line about youth being wasted on the young Greenberg feels that’s not cynical enough and fires back with “I’d go one step further. I’d go: Life is wasted on… people.” With great zeal he then adds, rhetorically perhaps, that ”I’m strangely ‘on’ tonight” while the dinner party looks at him without an ounce of agreement. I have used that line many times in the months since “Greenberg” has come out. Capturing the self loathing vibe and sour humor of Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach’s ”Greenburg” speaks to the misanthrope in me, perhaps us, and is honest enough to admit that we may all have a little Greenberg lurking inside of use.
That alone would make the film rather hard to tolerate so Baumbach balances his broken compass of a character with a 25-year-old babysitter played by “Mumblecore” (hate that term) princess Greta Gerwig. In this wonderful performance, a much needed base to Greenberg’s acid, Gerwig plays a family babysitter who is helping Greenberg watch over his brother’s killer pad and sick dog in L.A. while he’s out of town. Of course she ends up babysitting the mentally ill or perhaps mentally eccentric Greenberg, falling in a very depressing sorta love in the process. Even here the writers (this time Noah teams up with “Margot at the Wedding” star Jennifer Jason Leigh) do not fall back on the conventions we’d expect with these types of movies. The easy thing would be to give her the Helen Hunt in ”As Good as it Gets” treatment, positioning her as the patron saint of patient women who put up with ass-holes for no clear reason. She’s also is not some sort of bombshell that would not normally fall for this guy except for in movie world (she’s cute, Greenberg, muses, but only if you had to work with her in a all day, every day sort of way), nor is she terribly witty in that annoying indie movie way. She’s normal and yet what she does makes sense because the writers take the time to develop the character and explore her psychology. Not enough good things could be said of this performance.
Noah Baumbach is one of the best filmmakers around because he’s not out to sell us one his cleverness and not out to drone on about how much life sucks. His films contain all the humor of his collaborations with Wes Anderson but fare better for my money because he sits down and actually attempts to deal with and engage his audience in some sort of unspoken dialogue with these characters. And sometimes, as in a film like this, “dealing” with a character does not mean fixing them and hoping for that happy off-screen ending, either, which is to be applauded. Baumbach characters in this movie, while funny, are all grounded and match their respective intelligence levels. While plagued with psychological troubles Greenberg is not a ”Shine”-like savant or brilliant anti-social writer and his friends are just normal people who happened to grow up a little faster than Greenberg. While suburb and often underrated I always felt his characters in “The Squid and the Whale” and to a lesser extent “Margot,” especially the children, talked in a very stylized intellectual manner. Which is fine because so are many if not most of Allen’s characters. However it’s that kind of closed-off writing style that, outside of the Allen-verse, is impossible to sustain without coming off as a bit of a pretentious prick (Hal Hartley, Diablo Cody, etc. al.). Not Baumbach and definitely not “Greenberg.”
“Greenberg” also happens to be Baumbach’s most skilled work as a filmmaker. The pacing and visuals doing a good job at keeping up with the story and writing. Shots of a solitary Greenberg or visual metaphors like a hose spewing water and spinning around in a pool attain a poetic quietness that help sell the film’s somber but not sad tone. Even the awkward (an obligatory facet of comedies these days) or dramatic moments are scaled back to avoid “Meet the Parents” sized exaggerations and, on the other side of the Ben Siller spectrum, cheep melodramatic storytelling shortcuts like the drama filled but somehow hollow attempted suicide scene in “Royal Tenenbaums”–a scene I don’t like in a movie I do… depending on what mood I’m in (I have a weird love/hate relationship with that movie that even I don’t understand).
Ben Siller should be commended for acting in a “real” movie. How considerate of him. Stiller does a fine and nuanced job here but those words lack proper weight and I understand that saying so is about as useful as say Adam Sandler is good in all of “Punch Drunk Love” and small parts of “Funny People.” It also does me no good to state that now that he’s made his money he should stick with quality directors like Wes Anderson, Noah B and, strangely enough, himself because they all seem to be the only ones giving his career longevity. I guess I’d add Neil LaBute to that list well as he was fantastic in “Your Friends and Neighbors. Stiller’s willingness to dive into this troubled man and ability to render him vulnerable but not in a cheap or sentimental way results in his very best performance to date. We have a really unlikable guy to contend with here and are often are left wondering why people would even bother meeting him a second time after receiving a mean (but delightful on the other side of the screen) diatribe. Yet for all his miserable ways the film is not mocking Greenberg or laughing at him or studying him under a microscope. Gerwig sums the enigma of Greenberg up best when she tells him, simply, that ”mean people treat people mean.”
Grade: A
