Noah Baumbach (2010)
The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach’s most successful feature as a director to date, is about an adolescent boy who idolises his father before coming to realise that the father is a pompous, egocentric jerk. The film, although it’s absorbing and often funny, made me uncomfortable because the father was so obviously a jerk and I didn’t like being made to feel superior not only to him but to the son who took so long to see the man for what he was. The movie would have been better if the father had been able to take in the viewer as well as his son. The eponymous protagonist of Baumbach’s new movie Greenberg is also childishly selfish and a pain to be with but this time the audience isn’t allowed the same distance that Baumbach allowed us in The Squid and the Whale. Roger Greenberg knows what he’s like as much as we do: spending the best part of two hours in his company – he dominates the picture – is as gripping as it’s dispiriting. And it’s dispiriting largely because the film can’t go anywhere hopeful while staying true to its vision of the corrosive effects of self-centredness. Yet I liked Greenberg a lot: I could empathise with Roger and I admired Baumbach, who co-wrote the screenplay with (his wife) Jennifer Jason Leigh, for wanting to make a mainstream film about a thoroughly dislikeable man, and for his daring but astute casting and skilful direction of a challenging collection of actors.
The fortyish Roger, who nearly became a successful rock singer but has been earning his living as a carpenter, is a boy who’s never grown up and can’t work out where his adult life has disappeared to. Recovering from a nervous breakdown, he returns from New York to house sit for his younger brother Philip in Los Angeles while Philip, his wife and their two younger children are abroad on extended vacation (the fact that Vietnam is now a well-established holiday destination for middle-class Americans helps to get across the disorienting passage of time). During his stay Roger is expected to make himself useful, putting together various wooden constructions for the family, including a dog house for their Alsatian, Moller. Roger meets up again with people from his LA youth, notably his college friend Ivan (another member of the rock band that never quite was) and ex-girlfriend Beth. Given that Roger is notoriously unreliable, the house-sitting set-up might not sound convincing but it’s clear enough from the start that Philip expects his assistant Florence – a secretary-cum-shopper-cum-nanny-cum-dogwalker – to be the one taking care of things if need be. It’s the relationship between Roger and Florence that becomes one of the two emotional foci of Greenberg; the other is his relationship with Moller.
An endangered animal (usually a dog) is a recurring minor theme in the work of Baumbach and Wes Anderson[1]; in Greenberg, it’s become a central part of the story. Moller falls ill while he’s in Roger’s care: after visits to more than one vet, the dog is diagnosed with, and given medication for, an auto-immune disorder. His process of recovery is a rare instance of Baumbach being able to look on the bright side without compromising his integrity and Roger’s feelings for Moller are, relatively, heartwarming – although Baumbach doesn’t push this too far. In fact, Roger didn’t get protective enough of Moller for my liking: when his niece (I assume Philip’s eldest daughter) returns home for a day or two before setting off with a friend for Australia, she throws a big, noisy party; Roger doesn’t keep an eye on the dog until bawling out a guest for letting Moller drink beer. (And I was shocked when Roger briefly thinks about joining the Australian expedition and was prepared to leave the dog’s care to neighbours who regularly use Philip’s swimming pool but whom Roger has taken care not to speak to until this point.) Unless I missed it, the dog house never got built. Even so, Moller gets a better deal from Roger than Florence does.
The first scenes of Greenberg concentrate on this young woman; we see snatches of her world outside work for Philip Greenberg’s family – she’s someone whose life isn’t turning out the way she hoped but still has possibilities. (With her friends in a bar, Florence performs folky songs, although not particularly well.) When she finds herself attracted to Roger Greenberg, those possibilities seem to wither: she’s drawn to him but he’s a deadening weight and a drain on her emotional energies. At one particularly distressing moment, Florence tells Roger a story about something that happened to her as a teenager. It’s clearly a story she’s told – and enjoyed telling – before; he listens in rising but stony irritation and Florence’s awkward laughter and hopefulness evaporate. It isn’t hard for Greta Gerwig, who plays Florence, to have everyone’s sympathy but she gives a fine performance: she has a transparency which increases her vulnerability and a heaviness which seems to reinforce the sense of her being trapped by her feelings for Roger.
This is the first time I’ve liked and rated Rhys Ifans: as Ivan, he has a palpable lack of fulfilment – it seems to be growing round him like middle-age spread. Ivan, whose marriage is in trouble but who loves his child, is well aware that Roger – who admired Ivan for (we’re told) a British sense of style when they were students together – wants him to rage against the way things have turned out rather than accept them. (Ivan’s determination to do just that – Ifans’ characterisation suggests it’s through a mixture of stubbornness and lethargy – makes you both respect and despise him.) Baumbach is not only good at showing how people accept or resist disappointment in different ways. He’s also intelligent enough not to make Roger the only disagreeable person around. He implies at one point that the Greenberg offensiveness may be genetic: in an angry international phone call, Philip (Chris Messina) sounds as mean-spirited as his brother – the difference (if not the saving grace) is that Philip isn’t maladjusted.
Perhaps being fathers is what redeems Ivan and Philip but, if young children are transforming, Baumbach doesn’t seem to be enamoured of a different generation in their late teens or early twenties. (Florence is that bit older – she seems nearer thirty.) There’s a strong scene in a restaurant when Ivan and Florence (who are meeting for the first time) go out with Roger on his birthday. After Roger’s incisively nasty commentary on the high spirits of diners at another table, Ivan quotes Shaw’s line about youth being wasted on the young (Roger easily tops this: ‘I would go further – I would say life is wasted on people …’). It can’t just be Roger’s (and my) misanthropic envy that makes the youthful guests at his niece’s going away party look hideously careless and shallow. Roger’s self-preoccupation may not amount to depth yet he gets through to those of his contemporaries who have more depth (and to Florence). One of the most striking instances of this comes in a for-old-times-sake meeting with Beth, in a teahouse. The conversation, as conversation, goes nowhere yet we see that Roger is still affecting Beth – hurtfully – at a deeper emotional level. (Jennifer Jason Leigh plays this small, key role very acutely.) In a long message to Florence’s voicemail, Roger declares that ‘Hurt people hurt people’. The excellence of this line, which Ben Stiller delivers perfectly, is that it both makes sense and is in character: it’s credible but not completely sincere, self-critical but self-approving.
The first sight of Stiller is of the back of his head; when he turns to face us, he’s very aware of the camera. It’s not an encouraging start but, from this point onwards, Stiller hardly puts a foot wrong. This isn’t an example of a usually lively actor playing a depressed person and, as a result, seeming merely to be suppressing his innate exuberance. Ben Stiller retains his performer’s instincts and shaping under the blankness and holds our attention with a surprising lack of effort. His boyishness is also right for the role. Stiller may not be naturally well equipped to play substantial, serious roles but, even if that’s so (it remains to be seen), his superficiality is right and disturbing here: Roger Greenberg doesn’t have depth and Stiller lets us see the moments when Greenberg knows it. It’s because nothing that he says or registers seems deeply meant or fully felt that the character remains taut and tantalising. Roger spends a fair amount of his time writing letters of complaint. It’s a big moment for him when one gets published in The New York Times: he’s mad at life of course – the letters are the tip of the Greenberg. Because Baumbach, Jason Leigh and Stiller have created such a detailed and convincing misanthrope the moments of light relief feel almost like an evasion (although they’re certainly a relief too). When Roger launches into self-defensive psychobabble or asks Ivan to tell him honestly what other people say about him and gets incandescent when Ivan obliges, the moments seem conceived as comic routines. Yet they’re still believable and the clumsy bits in Greenberg are very rare. (One occurs when Florence has had a D&C – she says Roger wasn’t the father of the aborted foetus – and he decides she’ll need food and places a burger under her nose on the folded sheet of her hospital bed.)
Baumbach gets across Roger’s fear of life in powerfully effective ways, which may sound clichéd but don’t come across that way: Roger trying desperately to dog-paddle (aptly enough) a length of Philip’s pool as a blaring plane passes overhead; or being startled out of his nostalgic, drug-induced haze at the niece’s party, when a small furry creature is discovered in the pool. (The image remains more startling because the animal isn’t identified.) The film’s ending is as well handled as it could possibly be: Florence listens on her mobile to Roger’s message, telling her what she means to him, and he watches apprehensively. This discreetly hopeful moment is a little reminiscent of the similarly well-judged final scene in Half Nelson, except that the hopefulness here is even more tenuous. It would be grim if the voicemail made Florence feel all the more about Roger: what she’s already felt is more than painful. Noah Baumbach may have painted himself into a corner – if he tries to turn things upbeat it will seem phony, if he’s truthful he can stand accused of self-indulgence – but I’m glad that the cul-de-sac egotist Roger Greenberg has made it to the screen.
16 June 2010
[1] See note on The Royal Tenenbaums.
