Mailbox Film Festival #15: Greenberg (Baumbach, 2010)

I’m a big fan of Noah Baumbach’s first film, Kicking and Screaming, probably because I saw it shortly after finishing grad school.  I’m not sure there’s another movie that so squarely gets that post-graduation combination of anxiety and ambivalence, where the freedom to do anything paralyzes you into doing nothing. Sure, The Graduate is a classic, but the kids in Kicking and Screaming are a bit more relatable than a guy having an affair with his girlfriend’s mom. The characters in Kicking and Screaming may be pretentious and self-pitying, but then, aren’t most college students?

Strangely, though, I’m pretty cold when it comes to the rest of Baumbach’s filmography. I found his previous film, the sub-Rohmer character study Margot at the Wedding, actively repellent in its savage navel-gazing, and The Squid and the Whale only slightly less so. Still, hope springs eternal. The trailer for Greenberg looked great. But was it the clips from the movie that had me excited, or just LCD Soundsystem’s anthemic “All My Friends”?

Luckily, Greenberg’s the best movie Baumbach’s directed since the ‘90s.  Although the film deals with heavy issues like depression and aging, Baumbach gives it a levity missing from his recent movies. Like Kicking and Screaming, Greenberg is funny, but it’s humor cut with sadness and desperation. Those character traits so endearing in a post-adolescent Chris Eigeman – aimlessness, insecurity, social anxiety – look near-psychotic on a fortyish Ben Stiller. The students in Kicking and Screaming wore their cynicism like they wore their chunky heels and flannel shirts, but Roger Greenberg’s (Stiller) had a few decades to really get bitter. At the film’s start, he has just completed a stay in a mental hospital. He returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to housesit for his wealthy brother’s family. There, he meets with people who remind him of who he could have been, from the girlfriend he should have married (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the bandmates he let down by refusing to “sell out” (Rhys Ifans, Mark Duplass), all of whom have moved on with their lives in a way he hasn’t. He also strikes up an ambivalent affair with his brother’s much-younger personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), who’s so empty inside and afraid of being alone that she’s nearly as fragile as Greenberg himself. There are some painful moments in the film where Greenberg denigrates Florence just to make her feel as terrible as he does. Yet Florence continues to give him chances, partly because she’s lonely, but partly because she senses his reactions are a defense mechanism. It’s not pretty, but it’s believable.

Yet Greenberg doesn’t wallow in its depression. Baumbach has written some of his wittiest and most affecting dialogue in years, while the relationships between Stiller, Ifans and Leigh are so lived-in that their problems feel organic, not the product of a screenwriters’ agenda. While the film has a few missteps – Greenberg’s “conversion experience” in the last act is an overlong deus ex machina, and Gerwig’s range is a bit too limited to capture Florence’s emotional arc – at it’s best, it’s a reminder of how good Baumbach can be when he’s firing on all cylinders. Greenberg may still be a distant second to Kicking and Screaming, but try me again when I’m 40.

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Mailbox Film Festival #1: Cyrus (Duplass & Duplass, 2010)

In “Mailbox Film Festival,” I’ll write about every movie I get sent through my new Netflix account.  I’m signed up for the one-at-a-time plan, so if I’m disciplined enough (and the postal service cooperates), I should be writing about two of these a week.  First up: Cyrus, a semi-big-budget mumblecore dramedy by fellow Louisiana natives Jay and Mark Duplass.  

No one wants to be part of a movement called “mumblecore.” To fans, the term is a reductivist insult ghettoizing a nonexistent film genre.  To everyone else, it’s a signpost warning “BEWARE: poor lighting and blunted affects.” I admit, I lean more toward the latter view.  To me, mumblecore represents some of the most tiresome aspects of modern American independent film, from the navel-gazing preciousness of Hannah Takes the Stairs and Tiny Furniture to Old Joy‘s half-hearted politics and commitment to dullness.  But the two previous films by Jay and Mark Duplass (the road picture The Puffy Chair and the non-horror horror movie Baghead) hinted at an ability to transcend the limitations of their tiny budgets and aggressively indie aesthetic. Each time I’ve seen a Duplass Brothers movie, I’ve entered with my guard up.  And each time, I’ve been won over by the humanity of the characters.  Where so many of their peers’ films revolve around hipness signifiers disguised as humans, the Duplasses’ characters talk and act like real people.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Duplasses were the first of the movement granted a larger budget to make a major studio motion picture.  The brothers’ relationship with Fox Searchlight gives Cyrus two major advantages over their previous films: first, a more focused (if more conventional) narrative, and second, a really solid cast.  The term “mumblecore” derives from the flat line readings of many of the genre’s players who mistake underacting for naturalism.  But Cyrus features such reliable talents as John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Catherine Keener, all of whom successfully create fully believable characters.  Even a smaller role like the ex-wife’s new fiancé is cast with Matt Walsh of the Upright Citizens Brigade, whose inherent funniness adds some nice shading to what could have been a one-note part.  But the biggest surprise here is Jonah Hill as the title character.  Hill’s career so far has found him typecast as the most pathetic of the pathetic losers, and his role as Cyrus doesn’t stray too far from this niche.  With his doughy face and watery eyes, he resembles an overgrown baby yet to be weaned (at least figuratively) from his mother.  But beyond appearance, Hill also demonstrates a grasp of nuance first hinted at in the more emotional sequences in Superbad.   When Cyrus deadpans “It’s great to finally have a new dad,” Hill ably conveys both the pseudo-seriousness of the joke and Cyrus’s genuine fear of being abandoned.

A worse film would play the situation broadly, making Cyrus into Problem Child: The Post-Adolescent Years or exploiting the close relationship between him and his mother (Tomei) for incest jokes.  But the Duplasses understand the ironclad bonds that develop between two family members who have no one else to rely on but each other.  When John (Reilly) threatens to penetrate this bond, Cyrus strikes back not out of malevolence, but out of an instinct is to defend the only life he knows and the only person who loves him.   What seems like overindulgence on Molly’s part is her attempt to compensate for everything she was unable to give Cyrus while he was growing up.  She doesn’t recognize her son as acting out at first because, like anyone else, she’s too close to her family to see them as they really are. But when John forces her to reexamine Cyrus’s behavior, she’s smart enough to accept that she may have some blind spots about her son.

There are a few overly familiar beats and too-easy jokes, most of which naturally made their way into the film’s trailers.   But even at its most conventional, Cyrus maintains a commitment to treat its characters as real people.   The film ends not with a comedy-of-errors reveal and a happily-ever-after, but with a quiet understanding among the three main characters.  (The mysterious final scene, however, puts a question mark on whether any progress has actually been made.)

There’s a nice scene in middle of the film, when John and his ex-wife Jamie (Keener) not-so-accidentally run into Molly and Cyrus taking nature photographs in the park.  It’s early enough that John thinks Cyrus may be acting weird toward him (specifically, he suspects Cyrus stole his shoes), so he contrives a way for Jamie to meet him and offer her opinion.  Afterward, John and Jamie are surprised by how much they enjoyed their time with Molly and Cyrus, even despite the latter’s somewhat strange behavior.  “What about the wrestling? Was that weird?” John asks Jamie. “Yeah, it was weird,” she responds, “but weird in a good way.”

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