Greenberg
R (strong sexuality, drug use, strong language); 107 min.
Noah Baumbach's favorite terrain is deconstructing life's emotional ups and downs with characters so narcissistic and self-delusional that they make everyone on screen and off as uncomfortable as possible. With Greenberg, the writer-director who came to prominence with 2005's The Squid and the Whale has reached new highs or new lows, depending on your point of view.
Baumbach's latest film stars Ben Stiller as 40-year-old Roger Greenberg, whose failed life is envisioned as a self-inflicted wound caused by a bad decision Roger made years ago. The nanny/personal assistant/possible girlfriend Florence, one of Greenberg's few rays of light in Greta Gerwig's good hands, puts it best. In trying to explain away yet another injury to her psyche about midway through the film, she says, "Hurt people hurt people."
The same could be said of Baumbach's relationship with his audience, with Greenberg his angriest, most conflicted and most painful movie yet. Stiller's Roger is just out of a New York psychiatric treatment center where he has been recovering from a breakdown.
He has come to L.A. to ease back into the real world by housesitting for his brother, Phillip (Chris Messina), the epitome of everything Roger is not -- with a wife, kids, devoted dog, the booming international hotel business, the manse in the Hollywood Hills and the perfect assistant in Florence.
With the house to himself for six weeks, Roger sets about redefining the rest of his life since, as we soon learn, the rock-star thing of his youth didn't pan out and the carpentry gig is just temporary.
Redefining also seems to be what Stiller is up to here, the comedy guy taking a crack at a serious drama -- no easy task given that he went from familiar to iconic somewhere between There's Something About Mary and Night at the Museum.
There is a lot more mucking around in the emotional crises that come with growing older, if not quite growing up, but much of the spot-on nuance the filmmaker brought to Squid has gone missing. In Greenberg, it's sometimes difficult to figure out whether it's Roger or Baumbach who has lost his way.
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