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.
Look, Sally, Look 