Greenberg | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Ben Stiller as Roger Greenberg in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. [Photo: Focus Features]

Greenberg **

by Nick Schager on March 17, 2010 Jump to Comments (3) or Add Your Own

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To open Greenberg with a close-up of terminally cute hipster indie starlet Greta Gerwig set to the sounds of the insufferably lame Steve Miller Band's "Jet Airliner" is to court this particular critic's immediate ire. And yet as proven by his prior Margot at the Wedding, feel-good affection for his characters isn't high on Noah Baumbach's list of priorities, a fact once again evident in his latest, about an inveterate complainer named Greenberg (Ben Stiller) and his on-again, off-again romance with Florence (Gerwig). She's the personal assistant to the titular character's successful brother (Chris Messina), who while away on business with his family leaves his L.A. home in the care of Greenberg, a New York transplant and carpenter who's recently finished up a stay in a mental hospital (apparently caused by his mom's death), and is now apparently content to "do nothing" except write angry handwritten letters to whatever corporation (Starbucks, American Airlines) has angered him. He's a glass-half-empty grouch, which is why his former friends Eric (Mark Duplass) and Ivan (Rhys Ifans)—both of whom were in a band with Greenberg before the crank blew it up over egomaniacal artistic-integrity anxieties—greet his return with all the enthusiasm of a sleeping dog, even though Ivan nonetheless exhibits faint interest in reconciliation.

Teaming Stiller with Gerwig and Duplass is Baumbach's transparent attempt to meld Big Hollywood with mumblecore, but it's an ill-advised marriage that highlights the fidgety slacker faux-naturalism of the latter's typical performance style as well as accentuates the affected gravity of Stiller's "serious" mode. Baumbach is clearly after discomfiting humor, but in Greenberg, laughs come not from squirmy moments but via the times Stiller is allowed a cleverly written outburst or one-liner. Those instances are few and far between, alas, as the story rambles from one slight scenario to the next, whether it be Greenberg and Florence going on a date that ends in an abruptly halted bit of cunnilingus, or an awkward birthday dinner in which Greenberg invites Florence and then, upon her arrival, ditches the table to call his ex (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the idiotic hope of rekindling their long-dead relationship. It's all so much mopey-dopey dramedy lacking in import, and while Greenberg's incapacity for emotional or psychological stability often rings true in a case-study sense (his hang-ups are, if nothing else, consistently conceived in relation to each other and his backstory), it's nonetheless a mundane stuck-in-a-rut condition of little significance.

Which is, really, a softer way of saying that Baumbach fails to create a compelling case for investing oneself in Greenberg's quest for self-actualization, even as the film increasingly revolves around its screw-up protagonist's attempts to halt his screw-uppery. Despite beginning by focusing squarely on Florence, and then opening up its narrative to divide its attention between its two main characters, Greenberg eventually disregards Florence as a three-dimensional figure, relegating her to merely a plot device for Greenberg's will-he-or-won't-he personal development. This shortchanges Gerwig, whose discombobulated flightiness grows more endearing as the story ventures into its looser, more natural second act. But more pressing still, it turns the proceedings monotonous, fixated as they become on Stiller's unmoving portrait of self-destructive lost-soul miserablism.

Shot with strikingly tremulous cinematography awash in discomfiting L.A. sunlight by Harris Savides, the film is honest to itself and its characters, yet that alone isn't enough to counter the routine droopiness of its premise or execution. Weirdo peripheral players, a pay-attention-to-me pop soundtrack, and—worst of all—a climactic epiphany spurred by the image of a red balloon-man blowing in the noonday wind (shades of American Beauty) strive to inflate the consequence of Greenberg's saga. Such gestures are all for naught, helpless to elevate what is finally just another trifling tale of a man striving to grow and open up.

Director(s): Noah Baumbach
Screenplay: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Messina, Merritt Wever, Mark Duplass
Distributor: Focus Features
Runtime: 95 min.
Rating: R
Year: 2010

Comments

Duncan on March 25, 2010, 05:10 AM: Do you think the "men finally growing up" fatigue stems from the theme's repeated appearance in movies of late, or your increased distance from that phase? I know people were thinking the same thing going into something like Tiny Furniture (post-college malaise now seeming overused and indulgent, and increasingly unappealing now that many audience members had grown out of it), though in that case most ended up enjoying it partly because the main character's fundamental depression was acknowledged and depicted seriously—something that Greenberg also seems to be doing. What do other Slant staff think of the movie?
Nick Schager on March 25, 2010, 12:49 PM: Duncan, I think my fatigue stems from the former reason you list—namely, that every other movie about men focuses squarely on their inability to grow up. I wouldn't argue that such a theme doesn't reflect some aspect of modern masculinity, but I also think it's become painfully redundant at this point. That said, my bigger gripe with Greenberg is simply its inability to make me care about the plight of its protagonist, a nobody going nowhere with no endearing qualities or negative ones of any serious interest. He was just a middling loser, the kind of neurotic schlub you'd instinctively walk away from at a party because he offered nothing other than tiresome, clichéd gripes about the world and his own sad-sack existence.
felonious punk on October 9, 2011, 04:32 PM: I'm with Duncan in thinking this movie demands a little more from the viewer as well as the reviewer. It demands the reviewer to tell more about himself/herself, what age, sex, sexual orientation, because just as you found Gerwig increasingly "endearing", I got the idea that that's a euphemism for "attractive". You were attracted to her character and saw nothing of value in Greenberg. Basically, I'm curious whether someone who is more sympathetic to men and less vulnerable to feminine charm (like, say, a heterosexual woman) would have just the opposite response, because that is the true beauty of this movie: it has dual protagonists, more precisely dual than "Annie Hall" did. It's sex on celluloid, like "His Girl Friday", albeit post-Nirvana.