Monday Review: Greenberg

Susan:
Generally speaking, writer/director/asshole apologist Noah Baumbach can make even the most emotionally stunted, mean-spirited, barely-functional man-child seem vaguely likable, or at least sympathetic.  That’s how most of his movies work, in fact.  However, in Greenberg, his latest opus, Baumbach chooses to lay the onus of making a total dick likable on Ben Stiller of all people.  I don’t know about you, but I have a hard enough time liking Ben Stiller when he’s playing someone I’m supposed to like (e.g. Michael in Reality Bites).  So at the end of this thing, I mostly just hated him.  Hated him, hated the character, and therefore, hated how it felt to watch this movie.

The story of the film follows Greenberg (Stiller) a 40-year-old former musician and carpenter who has moved back to L.A. briefly from New York after having a nervous breakdown (because he’s a completely self-absorbed, neurotic asshole who alienates everyone on purpose and doesn’t take any responsibility for himself and that’s what people like that do when  no one wants to listen to their bullshit anymore).  While staying at his brother’s house, he begins a brief and super awkward love affair with his brother’s personal assistant/nanny-type-thing Florence (Greta Gerwig), an infinitely relatable (if somewhat unbelievable) 25-year-old woman who doesn’t quite know what she wants to do with herself.  He also spends his time trying to reconnect with Ivan (Rhys Ifans), a former band-mate, and Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an old flame with whom he seems to hope to rekindle things.  He also works on building a doghouse.  Other than that, the plot of the movie seems to center on his being a total asshole to everyone in his life and never really apologizing for it or having any kind of negative consequences.  Oh and the dog gets sick, I guess.  That happens too.

I don’t even know where to begin talking about how just plain upsetting this film was.  For a while there, I even thought maybe that was the point.  Maybe, I thought, Baumbach is sick of making movies about assholes who are sympathetic and he decided to finally go all out and make a movie about an asshole who is that and that alone and to portray him with such honesty that people (especially women) would squirm in their seats whenever he opened his stupid asshole mouth.  But then the film started making gestures toward change and redemption and I realized, no, no, I’m supposed to start liking him now.  But I didn’t like him, and I never started liking him, and then the movie was over.  Whatever this awful, depressing film was supposed to do, it just didn’t work.

Geoff:
Boy, what I wouldn’t have given for a solid female character here. Greta Gerwig does what she can with the script she was given, but man oh man does Baumbach put her in some awkward positions (literally) for seemingly no reason at all. What’s with Florence’s monologue in the middle about getting drunk and dancing topless with her girlfriend? It feels so completely unnatural. When and why did it seem like a good idea to add that scene? What purpose does it serve within the narrative? What purpose does it serve outside the narrative? As far as I can tell, it’s just to make her seem like a bit of a simpleton in the face of Greenberg’s know-it-all misanthropy.

I don’t know that I share your personal distaste for Ben Stiller. Put anyone in that role, and there’s just not a whole lot they’re going to be able to do with it to make the guy likable. There are interesting aspects of his character, specifically the sometimes not-so-subtle hints about his DSM-IV-grade OCD (the passenger-seat driving comments, the chapstick, the general agoraphobia, the general hypochondria) and his clear obsession with the past, but the mental maladies and regretful nostalgia do not make him likable or even all that sympathetic. I’ll admit I laughed a time or two because Stiller does know how to deliver a world-weary line, but a dick is still a dick. And, ultimately, there’s not much that redeems him or makes you want to cheer for him, especially when you know he’s never really going to change.

It’s funny you should mention Reality Bites because I felt the same way after that film that I did after this one. Namely, I was thinking, “those two are going to try to work things out again???” I’ll tell you what happens after the film cuts from Greenberg’s face to the credits. He’s going to watch Florence listen to his drunken, apologetic phone message, he’s going to decide he hates how she listens to her messages on the phone, and he’s going to go into another tirade. She’ll be hurt, he won’t be sorry, and they’ll both wait a couple days to perform the whole thing all over again.

I know I’ve watched and enjoyed movies with despicable central characters before, but what does it say about the film when you’re actively cheering against its main pairing?

Susan:
No kidding!  Which is all you do for the whole of the thing.

Friend Bobby pointed out that we could read Greenberg as Troy Dyer (Ethan Hawke’s character) from Reality Bites at age 41.  A man who built nothing with his life and so has to try to recapture a lost youth because he has nothing else.  Who takes out his frustration with his own life on someone young because she has something he can never get back and because she’s comfortable with herself while he is not.  I am on board with this reading.

But I do want to say in regard to the scene you mentioned where she tells the story about getting drunk with her friend that I didn’t think that story made her seem like a simpleton at all.  I thought the point was that he realizes she has a life, and a sexual one at that, outside of him that he can’t control.  I found Baumbach’s treatment of her to be honest (until the point where she lets him drive her to her abortion instead of going with her friend — no amount of withholding-father psychology would cause her to make that choice) and fairly true to life.  The moment when she says, “I need to stop doing things just because they feel good,” as her excuse for not sleeping with him is a good example of the kind of really honest dialogue that she was given to work with.  Her performance is great, that’s true, but that character wasn’t written badly either, to Baumbach’s credit.  Well, for most of the movie, anyway.  Until Baumbach gets too caught up in wanting to redeem Greenberg at the expense of Florence.  Then he has to twist her to make it work, because his allegiance is clearly with his male protagonist.

And that’s still my biggest criticism of the film.  The last line of the film, “This is you,” which is Florence’s response to getting Greenberg’s drunken voicemail in which he finally tells her he likes her, seemed to indicate that those “soft” moments — his decision to get out of the car and pick her up instead of going to Australia with two 20-year-olds, or the moment he leaves the party disgusted with the young people he’s surrounded by to call her — are supposed to be the “real” Greenberg.  But I totally disagree.  I think Florence and his few moments of kindness toward her are a dalliance from a 40 year pattern, and each of them is still based in a self-serving desire to escape the fact that he’s not young and cool anymore, but is rather aging and a-sea in a world where he has left himself with nothing.

Geoff:
You make a good point about that scene, and you’ve turned me around on why Baumbach probably included it. But I still don’t like it, just because it does not in any way seem like her character would consider that a relatable anecdote. Greenberg talks about an inside joke he has with his friend, and then she springboards from that into her own … nope, wait, she’s not sharing an inside joke but just some story about getting drunk and naked in the hills of Hollywood? Except she’s kind of acting like it’s an inside joke? It’s a small, stupid thing for me to be hung up on, but it’s just a very awkwardly played scene, and it completely took me out of the movie for a while.

I also might have been frustrated by it because I, like you, found her largely believable up until nearer to the end. As you said, her accepting his ride to the abortion clinic is indeed the main point of disconnect where the character starts to lose her three-dimensionality and become simply a backstop for Greenberg’s apologetic voicemail (and likely future voicemails to come).

That’s still where the movie truly lost me. And I think, on further reflection, I actually liked a lot of the film up until that point. The more I’ve considered it in the past few days, the more convinced I am that we’re in factnot supposed to be cheering for Greenberg at the end. Maybe the movie really is just a study in assholedom (or dickdom?) and how such people can’t ever really be helped because they do so much to make themselves unapproachable. I’ll agree with you that it’s certainly a depressing message, which they even push in the film — “hurt people hurt people.” But I can’t deny that the movie’s had me thinking, which is something I tend to like.

I still don’t buy Florence’s decisions toward the end, but I think I might be coming around a bit regarding the film’s buildup and overall raison d’etre (can I get away with not being mocked for using that term? probably not). I’m sure I’ll be lambasted for flip-flopping here, but I figure I’ve gotta be honest. Go ahead and skewer away, Susan, as you are wont.

Susan:
Oh no, Geoff.  I mostly expected you would convince yourself you liked it eventually.  I mean, yes, the movie made you think, which you dig, and also, you’re a man.  Not to reduce it to gendered terms, but if this movie had been about a broken down 40-year-old woman who was taking advantage of a younger man (like in The Good Girl for example) I probably would have been more on board.  However, I would have been more on board with that because those narratives almost never get told, while the story of the broken man who still gets to have a life full of people comes up all the damn time.  (See our review of Nine for instance.)  Frankly, we ARE supposed to root for him.  Maybe not in that oh-man-he’s-really-turning-his-life-around kind of way, but we are DEFINITELY supposed to find him sympathetic in SOME way.  The movie makes gestures to it — the growing blow-up man outside the gas station right before he goes back to get Florence, the moment at the party when the kids are being mean to him, his awkward lunch with Beth.  Even that “Hurt people hurt people” thing is a way of explaining him away.  He’s a broken hurt person so he hurts others.  Well, get over it.  I don’t want to watch this shit for two hours.  I’ll just live my life, thank you very much.  There are enough awful people in the world without our writing movies to try to garner sympathy for them.

I’m not saying the movie wasn’t impactful.  I’m not saying it didn’t stick in my brain.  I’m saying, screw Greenberg and his man-child bullshit and screw Baumbach for continuing to make these movies apologizing for the behavior of terrible, terrible men.

Geoff:
I can’t deny the aging, bitter, insecure male is such an oft-used trope at this point that it can be easy at times to roll ones eyes, but I can still go along with it if it’s done well (which Nine really wasn’t to me). I don’t know that it’s because I’m a man, either. I’d like to think I could enjoy a film involving a similarly motivated female character, but you’re right that such a story is rarely told.

Please know, I’m still with you about the ending being forced and Greta Gerwin doing things her character decidedly would not do, just to service the narrative possibility that she and Greenberg will give it another go. And if you’re a full, whistling-down-the-street optimist, I guess you could sit there and sympathize with Greenberg and say, “Hey, maybe they’ll make it work this time. Maybe Greenberg can be happy.” As already stated though, I just can’t see it going that way. He’ll be angry, and she’ll be sad about his anger, and it would have been so much more interesting plot- and character-wise if he’d just plain lost Florence by the end of the film because of his own inability to change.

I understand that you’re also railing against even feeling sorry for Greenberg in the first place though, and while I agree with you that I’d almost certainly get up and walk away from him at a party, I can still see how he suffers. The closed-in feeling created by Baumbach through sound and camera angles at the party full of screaming children, the bitterness that masks a great deal of hurt and fear and pain and paranoia when he tells the 20-year-olds that they’re “mean” for laughing at him when he’s stoned …

Such portions don’t forgive his actions to me, but they do make me sad for all the clear intelligence and possibility going to waste because Greenberg can’t interact with other human beings. They make me sad for the Greenberg that will never be, and they make me sad for all the people out there like him who can’t get help because of the wall they’ve built against the world. And in that way it’s effective to me. Up to the point where Baumbach grabs the bull by the horns and MAKES you root for him, it’s entirely possible to like the movie without liking him, but once Greenberg’s adjusting that picture on the wall as Florence smiles from the bed, all that’s left to do is mime shooting yourself in the head.