Greenberg

365 Films

Entry #107

Greenberg (2010)

Directed by Noah Baumbach

Now remember how I just told you that Margot at the Wedding was intentionally off-putting?  Forget all of that because I don’t think it holds a candle to the title character and the entire film of Greenberg.  I know people who detest the very idea of this film (all for legitimate reasons of course) and there was even a piece written in the AV Club about the specific moment where the film lost one of its critics.  That moment, for your own edification, was when Greenberg (Ben Stiller) storms out of Florence’s (Greta Gerwig) apartment for no less an offense than telling an anecdote that doesn’t quite live up to his own high conversational standards.  In case you were wondering, that scene works for me because it’s a genuine moment of surprise and therefore comedy when Greenberg’s character displays yet another stunning lack of social graces around people he supposedly likes.  Rewinding a bit, in taking a page from the romantic comedy playbook, Greenberg begins as though it is dying to tell the story of two lost souls who connect through sheer happenstance when one flies in from New York to LA to house sit for his brother while he and his family are visiting Vietnam while the other also happens to be the personal assistant to that brother.  I believe that the likeliness with which one is inclined to stay with the film is pretty much tested by the time these two meet alone and in a sexual context for the first time.  When one of the most awkward, halted sex scenes ever committed to film occurs, you’re either watching with a fascinated kind of horror as these two are continually pulled together and apart or you’re pissed off beyond all belief by the fact that this incredibly charming and seemingly competent young woman is allowing this pathetic excuse for a human being to constantly weasel his way into her life.  Yet, even in that dichotomous push-pull does Baumbach explore territory that few comedies let alone romantic comedies ever dare to tread.  In allowing no concrete, specific reason for these two to become romantically linked, the film becomes somewhat of a Meta commentary on the entirety of the romantic comedy genre.  It is here that we see what may be the fullest expression of Baumbach’s unique ability to take traditional genre elements (if they can be called that) and push them to their utmost extreme.  Rather than finding this alienating, I find it liberating how it brings the film to a particularly emotional climax that feels honest and earned and never like a cheat.  I see this film as Baumbach taking the stunted intellectual-artistic type character that has become his trademark, drag him into middle age, and suddenly thrust him into the “real world” that consists of the rest of Hollywood’s cinematic output.  In breaking free from the rarified environs that made up his five previous features (it can’t just be a random coincidence that Greenberg takes place in Hollywood), Greenberg shows Baumbach holding up a truly revealing self-portrait.  In that regard, Greenberg is Baumbach at his most merciless and self-lacerating, but also at his self-deprecatingly compassionate.