Greenberg

Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig) is the Greenberg family nanny in L.A. The family goes on a trip while the brother Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) drops by to housesit. She's young trying to find her way. He's a New Yorker misanthrope just out of an insane asylum. He doesn't drive and writes complaint letters. His friend Ivan Schrank (Rhys Ifans) pushes him to go to Eric Beller (Mark Duplass)'s barbecue where he runs into ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh) with her kids. Roger, Eric and Ivan were once in a band but Roger refused to sign a recording deal. Florence and Roger have an on-and-off relationship.

Ben Stiller is going too dark. It's a matter of slight miscalibration. This could be a great indie rom-com but I can't find any likability to Roger. His dialog could have some sharp sarcastic jokes to take off the edge. I need to laugh with him but his dark depressed nature keeps getting into the way. Getting angry over his birthday is probably the only laughable moment although saying Florence's emotional story is pointless gets a small chuckle. His anger needs to have more comedy as an outlet and to balance his dark side. It has some good moments but it could have been better.

This film was slightly misadvertised. It is not a "funny movie," it is a pseudo-slice of life movie with an eccentric but believable character. It is a comedy in the sense that it is not a tragedy.

I enjoyed this film immensely. I found it very cathartic and realistic. It is "funny" in the sense that Ben Stiller is socially inappropriate at times, but honestly, it's not a "funny" film, and sometimes the film tries to be funny and definitely falls flat. The story is also a little slow to start. That said, it's still a good film.

Some people clearly don't "get" this film...Anyone who says "it wasn't funny!!" or "nothing happened!" is missing the point. This is one of those rare movies based entirely on character, with a very realistic plot progression. It's not the best movie of the year or anything, but it's a really good example of a character-driven story. If you don't care about or "get" Greenberg, there is nothing for you here.

I must protest the people who say the film is unbelievable. It *is* very believable, but not necessarily relatable. It portrays a man bordering on mental instability *very* well.

Ultimately, this movie is similar to Woody Allen pics in affect, although much less "funny." But it still has that "world through the eyes of a neurotic" gimmick, as well as the laissez-faire plot progression.

Ben Stiller also deserves praise for a great, "real" performance as Greenberg, and he is supported by a mixed cast (some great, some poor).

I recommend this film to anyone familiar with OCD, anxiety, or anyone over 40 who asks "what happened?"

Greetings again from the darkness. Noah Baumbach wrote and directed the excellent "The Squid and the Whale", and it is with "Greenberg" that he really makes a statement as an independent filmmaker to anticipate. The second gem is always the most elusive. That said, I am not sure I can recommend this movie to very many people, despite all the good things I am about to write.

This is the first Ben Stiller role that actually seems to fit him. His typical role is as a punchline. Here, he plays a guy who recently suffered a nervous breakdown and is now house-sitting for his rich brother, whose family is vacationing in Vietnam. Throughout the movie, Greenberg states he is concentrating on doing "nothing" right now. Of course, that is his defense mechanism for being unable to connect or communicate with any real person. Yes, that sounds bleak ... and it is. Yet, it is also fascinating and thought-provoking.

Despite Stiller's strong turn, Greta Gerwig (as Florence) proves to be the heart of the story. She is the family assistant to Greenberg's brother and finds herself oddly attracted to Greenberg's vulnerable state. This is my first exposure to Ms. Gerwig and I find her fascinating as an actress. She has a natural openness on screen and is certainly no glamour-gal. Instead she comes across as a very real 25 year old trying to make sense of life - especially her own.

In addition to Ms. Gerwig, Rhys Ifans provides outstanding support work as Greenberg's long ago band mate. This is the polar opposite of Ifan's character in "The Boat that Rocked" as here is just a guy putting together a grown up life for himself. He struggles with the adjustment, but accurately depicts how choices can make or break us.

I am not sure whether to categorize this as a character study or just an exquisitely written series of scenes that hit the nail on the head. One of the best scenes of the film is when Stiller meets up with Jennifer Jason Leigh and she immediately rebuffs his reconciliation attempts. They had been a couple briefly 15 years ago and she has obviously moved on. Excellent film-making.

The best way I can describe Greenberg the character is that he is a compilation of the dark thought that we all experience from time to time ... a desire to do nothing, wanting to be blunt and direct, dreams of recapturing the magic of youth, and of course, writing complaint letters for everything wrong in the world. Obviously, most of us spend very little real time on these things, but that is the Greenberg character. Let's keep an eye on Mr. Baumbach - he may just be the real deal.

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.

"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.