Greenberg (2010)

If you ever wondered what Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield might look like in middle age, look no further than Greenberg. If you’re like me and failed to see the appeal of this neurotic, self-absorbed and, quite frankly, cruel character, prepare to be irritated. Because, if Ben Stiller’s portrayal of the title character is correct, some phony pricks never change.

At the start of the film, Roger Greenberg arrives at his brother Phillip’s well-appointed mansion in Los Angeles after 15 years in New York City and a stint of undetermined length in a mental hospital. He used to be cool–in a mid-90s, slacker-in-a-band, suspicious of everyone, Reality Bites sort of way–but at 40, his misanthropic ways have lost their luster. The only one still able to see anything redeeming in Greenberg is Florence (Greta Gerwig), his brother’s 25-year-old personal assistant/babysitter/dogsitter. But then, her life is as rudderless as the stunted man-child’s.

While Phillip is away on a vacation in Vietnam with his wife and kids, nebbishy Roger pursues a stop-and-start romance with Florence. During the stops, he also tries to rekindle a romance with an ex-girlfriend named Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also co-wrote), who has gotten married, had kids of her own, gotten divorced, and generally grown up. During the start portions, Greenberg is a needy child, who makes Florence take him everywhere since he refuses to drive, has really bad sex with her, and says unforgivably hurtful things.

I guess that’s because writer-director Noah Baumbach wants us to believe that “hurt people hurt people,” a lame four-word aphorism thrown about in this film as though it’s supposed to make asshole behavior excusable. Except Baumbach failed to clue us in to who exactly hurt his lead character. It wasn’t Phillip, who was left all alone to care for and bury their ailing mother. Nor was it former band-mate Ivan (Rhys Ifans), who was left to fix computers and patch the holes in his struggling marriage after Greenberg’s selfish refusal to sign a record deal kept their band, The Magic Marker, from becoming the next Pearl Jam.

Greenberg is the latest in Baumbach’s signature string of rich, educated people behaving badly (The Squid and the Whale), only this time it’s a GenXer in L.A. instead of a divorcing couple in New York City. But Baumbach’s screenplay defies the first rule of storytelling–there isn’t a beginning, middle or end anywhere to be found. The film meanders along as a month in the life of messed up, but ultimately boring, losers.

Meanwhile, his directing is intentionally without emotional highs and lows–writing a letter of complaint to a pet taxi is as poignant as getting an abortion–but just because Baumbach means to do it doesn’t make it any better. Likewise, just because Baumbach winks and nods to everything Woody Allen has ever done, it doesn’t make this film Annie Hall.

With a main character as unlikable as Greenberg, the audience needs to have something to hang on to. Florence is as close as we come to it. Gerwig is like a chubby Kate Winslet. She plays the big, pretty, sweet girl who has no idea what she wants or deserves with an amazing ease. Unfortunately, that ease veers into ennui as Gerwig mumbles her reactions to Greenberg’s epic failure as a man. But who can blame her? I was bored out of my gourd, too.

Meanwhile, Stiller succumbs to the familiar trap that many a comedian falls into when trying to play it straight. He is so somber and so hell-bent on delivering gravitas, that it’s more like he’s sleepwalking from whisky glass to whisky glass (did I mention that Greenberg is also a high-functioning alcoholic) than acting. I know that busting out his best “Blue Steel” would hardly have been appropriate, but without a little of Stiller’s nerdy, mischievous sparkle, there’s nothing to like or find funny about Greenberg, a film that is ostensibly still a romantic comedy, albeit a dark one.

I get the sense that Greenberg was supposed to be a meaningful film about growing older, being lonely, and learning to connect. Instead, it is a vague, stream-of-consciousness homage to co-dependency, arrested development, and neurosis that would make Holden Caulfield proud.

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