Greenberg

Greenberg, about a discontented 40 year old who's not at all sure what he's doing with his life, is a provocative slice of life - but it's not for all tastes. It moves slowly and demands extra attention, but even if you're really into the story you might wonder where those 107 minutes went.

Ben Stiller, in a terrific performance, is the titular ne'er do well, an itinerant carpenter housesitting for his brother in Los Angeles for six weeks. During that time, be meets and falls in and out of like for his brother's executive assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig, who's also magnificent), who's just as awkward as Roger Greenberg.

The bulk of the film covers their relationship on one track and the events of Greenberg's past that have led to his existential where-am-I ponderances. Some 15 years earlier, Roger was in a band out of college with a few good friends. They were apparently quite good, but when a record company offered them a deal, Roger turned it down, afraid of the success it might bring. This led to a serious rift in the band, causing each member to go his separate way; none of the members has played much music in the intervening years.

Liking Roger isn't easy for anyone, not even the audience. He's sort of a jerk. (It's mentioned that he's just been released from a mental institution, although the cause for his hospitalization is not explained.) The film indicates that Roger has problems maintaining relationships, sometimes acting out - and lashing out - in order to keep himself safe and serene. His arrival in LA allows him to reconnect with several of his old friends, many of whom he hasn't seen in those 15 years.

It's these fractured relationships that hold the key to Greenberg's life. At times, he tries to patch things up and move on with his life, but he's just as likely to snap at the friend or lapse into the same behavioral issues that had plagued him as a young man.

Stiller is really, really good in this. He's surprisingly very good at showing myriad emotions convincingly. At once, you believe Greenberg is a polarizing, hurting, hurtful man on the cusp of the rest of his life. Stiller's brand of comedy can take time to grow on someone, but he really shows his range here. I certainly didn't know he could plumb the depths of a character like he did to Roger Greenberg.

Gerwig is his equal and is a real presence here. Florence is - like her namesake Nightingale - a huge help to Greenberg's brother as his assistant, and he's much more savvy about taking care of the house than Greenberg is about taking care of himself (in a funny early scene, she asks him to make a list of things for her to get at the store, and he writes "whiskey" and "sandwiches"). But as good as she is at her professional life, her personal life is an absolute mess. She goes on one-night stands because they feel good - okay, no problem there - but she has few true connections in life. She has one good friend, and you get the impression that her family isn't really close to her (she says her niece doesn't relate too well to her). Florence is physically and emotionally awkward, unsure of herself in all ways save for her job, in which she's commanding. This, of course, also makes her terribly vulnerable to the advances of the older Greenberg.

So the acting is really top notch, but the movie just isn't for everyone. Here's why. There's a lot of plot, a lot of things happening, but very little is resolved or accomplished; the film almost feels like a stream of consciousness to which we're privy. What WILL Greenberg do after the six weeks are up? Will he stay with Florence? Will he jilt her? In the end, does it really matter? Probably not; the ending is abrupt, although not out of place for the rest of the film. But one really needs to be atuned to Greenberg's plight in order to enjoy the film. If one isn't, the movie's mostly dull with bits of funny moments interspersed throughout. I didn't find it terribly heartwarming, just a character study of an unlikable character. Which is not a bad thing at all, but this one just didn't completely work for me.

You know those fleeting, inelegant moments and transitory, almost Seinfeldian scenarios in our lives that, unlike on Seinfeld, we never really talk about, because they betray how clueless and insecure we all are? You know how we'll go to parties basically to see one person and find we're inept at opening up and socializing with anyone else? You know those pointless, roundabout stories we'll tell about something that happened that we thought was interesting or funny but we don't realize how boring or monotonous they are till we're halfway through them? What about the receiving end of that situation? Why are we so worried about hurting these painful storytellers' feelings when they're making us so uncomfortable having to feign interest or amusement for indefinite durations? You know those sexual experiences we never talk about even to our best friends because they were so painfully awkward and nakedly ungraceful? You know how when we're on drugs we only indulge occasionally and we find ourselves wording things in creative ways, feeling overconfident and impulsive while everyone else is viewing us as rather reckless? Roger and Florence know, all too painfully, awkwardly, uncomfortably, recklessly well.

Some of us handle these situations much better than others. Some of us save face, some of us don't care that much, some of us read other people well enough to know it's all just part of life. Forty-year-old carpenter Roger Greenberg and his brother's college-age assistant Florence are stranded by an utter deficiency of any of these possible salvages. Inevitably finding themselves sharing these horrible moments whenever they're together, they are in turn repulsed by one another. They can't stop reeling over what happened last night, the other night, a week ago. And while Florence is too timidly self-effacing and in need of being with someone to bring herself to write off Roger, Roger's whole perspective on everything is disfigured by his narcissistic compulsion toward suffering, his hermit-like disdain for any and every inconvenience, and righteous indignation that he can't allow to exist alongside ever being at fault. It's Seinfeld in the bathroom with a razor blade in the tendon.

When you watch the trailer, you're watching a nervously smoking exec hoping to at least break even by streamlining all the overtly laugh-inducing moments. With the possible exception of less than a handful, they indeed are all in the preview. The dry carping lines by Stiller, the Starbucks letter, at the party telling off the Gen-Y stoners, hitting the SUV and bailing when it actually stops. Greenberg is a comedy, but in such an internal and carefully cringe-worthy way that most scenes are seemingly shapeless renderings of a combination of characters situated in a combination of day-to-day situations and the readily apparent punchline moments are indeed that few and that far between. But that is its intent, and it succeeds with witty effect: An impossible jerk and a bashful, marginally popular girl idiosyncratically push each other's most debilitatingly precarious buttons but aren't able to go their separate ways because they're too thin-skinned to be alone. It is the ultimate anti-romantic comedy. No Golden Globe moments here.

Ben Stiller gives the performance I believe all truly good comic actors capable of, one of fierce angst and biting personal honesty. We've seen Sandler unravel an entirely different dimension of himself in Punch Drunk Love and Reign Over Me, Robin Williams in World's Greatest Dad and Insomnia, Pryor in Blue Collar, and so on. Roger Greenberg is his tour de force as a well-rounded, perceptive and talented actor who's not afraid of his audience going as far as to dislike his character, which would be entirely understandable for many viewers to feel, because he deeply understands Greenberg and doesn't judge him. The gratifying discovery we make here is that of Greta Gerwig. Yes, she is very sexy, but exactly the way Greenberg describes, "She's, I don't know, bigger. I find it sexy." She's pure salt of the earth, a real person unfettered by make-up or fashion. I know many girls who talk, dress and act just like her Florence, who she makes come alive on just the right naturalistic levels.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach made two previous films very strongly akin to this. They were the concise and beautiful The Squid and the Whale and the soul-crushingly relatable and mercilessly matter-of-fact Margot at the Wedding. All three of these films have difficult and self-unaware individuals at their centers, they each share a bone-dry and woefully cynical sense of humor and they each reveal Baumbach's inimitable talent at showing us characters and situations so universal and everyday as to level-headedly gaze at the most abstract innards of acknowledgeable moments of personal and social frustration. His actors always feel extemporaneous, in the moment, unscripted. Their characters belong to an ever-pervading yet little-characterized contemporary facet of liberalized information-age American society. At arm's length he shares the quirky, idiosyncratic likes of Wes Anderson, except there is not one shred of hopeful sweetness or heart-warming serendipity. Those are things we love, and we embrace them whenever we experience them, but at the expense of never taking the time to face the realities of the banal, the bilious stuff of everyday life. That's where Baumbach comes in.

Just as he's turning forty, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) finds himself with no real friends, no significant other, and no actual purpose in life. He's also just been released from a mental institution, so you can well imagine that his neuroses are going to be pretty much off the chart as well. A carpenter and former musician who regularly resides in New York City, Greenberg is currently house-sitting at the Hollywood Hills home of his wealthy and successful brother, Phillip (Chris Messina), while the latter is away on business in Vietnam with his family. While he's staying there, Greenberg meets Florence (Greta Gerwig), a sweet but rather unfocused woman almost half his age, who works as a personal assistant – i.e. dog walker, babysitter and all-around gopher - to Phillip and his family.

Greenberg's mental issues manifest themselves through various phobias and idiosyncrasies, all of which lead us to the conclusion that he is generally just afraid of life, of taking a risk when doing so could possibly lead to failure. To that end, he avoids large groups of people, writes endless letters of complaints to companies he feels have somehow screwed him over, overreacts to other people's words and actions, and makes a general antisocial and sociopathic pain-in-the-ass of himself. And to no one is he more psychologically abusive than to Florence, a girl with her own share of vulnerabilities, who in his own crazy way he is obviously trying to impress but who he just keeps pushing away with his eccentric behavior.

It's hard to really get much of a bead on either Greenberg or Florence, and that is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the screenplay by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Noah Baumbach, who also directed the film. On the one hand, one appreciates the complexity of the characters, their refusal to allow themselves to be pigeon-holed into one neatly delineated box or other. On the other, the coolly objective stance the script takes creates a barrier between us and the characters, the result being that we find it hard to identify or empathize much with them, especially Greenberg, who finally becomes as off-putting to us as he is to those he comes in contact with throughout the course of the picture. In drama, there's a fine line between a character who is intriguingly different and one who is just annoyingly self-indulgent, and "Greenberg" crosses over that line with dismaying regularity.

Still, the performances are excellent – this is probably Stiller's best dramatic work to date – and the inconclusive ending is impressively brave enough to erase a multitude of earlier sins.

This film has major flaws and isn't exactly an enjoyable watch. Its first problem is that it goes out of its way to be awkwardly geeky, it seems contrived and not quaintly quirky. Ben stiller is the wrong guy for the job as he just comes across as Ben stiller in another movie and although he is well known for playing characters with character flaws that make them boarder line jerks in this instance we never get to believe this character is real because its just Ben Stiller being a slight variation of what he always plays. Greta Gerwig is a recognizable conglomeration of various awkward geek characteristics we've seen around and she does it well but because the script seemed so contrived her performance is somewhat tainted by what's around it. The biggest question about this film an the people it portrays is why should we care. I know I didn't and for that reason it fails.

"A shrink said to me once that I have trouble living in the present, so I linger on the past because I felt like I never really lived it in the first place, you know?"

Greenberg is a drama about...Greenberg. Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), to be specific. A 40 year-old New Yorker who returns to Los Angeles to stay at his successful brother's home while he and his family are away on a trip. He's not dealing with his life not going the way he planned as well as most of the other people he knows, and he's perpetually stuck in the past. The music he listens to is old, he talks to people about events that happened 15 years ago that they don't even remember, and he's just generally an unhappy guy. His main activity is writing letters of complaint to various companies.  

To say that Roger is flawed is an understatement. He just got out of a mental hospital recently, he's self-centered, and he tends to freak out about insignificant things as a way to protect himself from people and the world. Yet, I still liked him. As does Florence, (Greta Getwig) his brother's personal assistant who isn't exactly a model of happiness and mental health, herself, and Ivan (Rhys Ifans), Roger's long-suffering old friend and band mate, who is having family troubles of his own. 

If I had to compare this to another movie, it would be Rachel Getting Married. Not because of any plot similarities, but because of a similar tone and some shared themes. Specifically, being adrift in adult life and how issues and regretted decisions from youth can linger and fester. Also similar to Rachel Getting Married, there's never a breakthrough moment where the flawed characters are suddenly okay, and all the problems disappear.  If you expect grand resolutions from your movies, please avoid Greenberg. All we get is a sliver of light at the end that makes us think that something positive may be happening in some of these characters' lives. We're left to imagine and hope that Roger, Florence, and Ivan are on the road to getting (or finding out) what they need from life.  

So yeah, I liked it. It's a good "indie" drama, and quite different from Stiller's usual thing. Stiller and Gerwig were both great, the characters were well-written, and I've always been interested in these kinds of stories about adults flailing away blindly in this tricky thing we call life. If you're a fan of movies like Margot at the Wedding, The Squid and the Whale (both movies share Greenberg's director), and Rachel Getting Married, I'd suggest that you give this a try.