You might expect a film called Greenberg to be called Greenberg because it's about someone called Greenberg, yet we spend the opening ten minutes of Noah Baumbach's latest comedy-drama in the company of one Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), a housemaid for a rich L.A. couple, as she completes her daily tasks, seizing a few moments for herself while walking her employers' dog in the Hollywood hills. Enjoy the tranquility while you can: this prologue is as fluent and comforting as Greenberg gets.Back at street level, Florence reveals herself to be a passive, subservient creation, mousily refusing to chase up her employers for the wages owed to her before they jet off for the holidays. It's Baumbach's inspired (or downright crazy) idea that the vacant house should be filled by Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a needling, passive-aggressive control freak recovering from a nervous breakdown. Quickly, we learn that Greenberg is called Greenberg because Greenberg himself comes to unbalance and dominate any space he comes to occupy; so great are the character's needs and neuroses (he spends his recovery writing petty complaint letters to the major corporations he feels have wronged him) that he barely has room for anybody else in his life.
"I'm kind of busy doing nothing right now," Greenberg mutters at one point, and that line, coupled with the presence of Gerwig and The Puffy Chair's Mark Duplass in supporting roles, suggests the film is a mainstream takeover or appropriation of a vibe carefully cultivated in a half-dozen or so of those ultra lo-fi "mumblecore" movies detailing the lives and loves of America's latest generation of slackers. Early scenes in Greenberg, certainly, hold to mumblecore's loose and easy rhythms, and there are certain details that chime: a party where - as the hero observes - "all the adults are dressed like children", or Florence's confession, when Greenberg starts poking around her tiny bedsit, that she doesn't read enough. In turning their attentions to individuals who seem too concerned with getting by to actually live, Baumbach and his wife and co-writer Jennifer Jason Leigh are pushing towards a very mumblecore understanding of our current freelance-convenience, hand-to-mouth culture.
Yet Greenberg is L.A. mumblecore, which doesn't work. The limitations of the lo-fi form would make sense applied to the lives of slackers eking out an existence in some anonymous mid-Western burg; presented with metropolitan types who've been granted the run of a relative's fancy-pants mansion (and his staff), we begin to diagnose a bad case of Paradise syndrome. (One of Greenberg's complaints is that whenever he goes into Starbucks these days, he only ever hears the music he likes: well, boo hoo.) Baumbach, the intelligent director behind The Squid and the Whale, knows his lead is constantly kvetching, and that this might not be the most appealing of traits; the problem is that the film, being a Universal Pictures presentation of a Ben Stiller vehicle, can't help but seek to make some sort of virtue out of this.
In the most divisive screen role since Sally Hawkins' Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky - a character sitting blissfully at the opposite end of the behavioural spectrum - Stiller is encouraged to play all the preening, controlling notes in his comic repertoire (those previously aired in Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder), only without the laughs: all we learn from Roger Greenberg is that characters this unhappy with life are no fun to be around. Gerwig, too, is asked to be slower and less sparky than the ingenue who lit up the negligible Hannah Takes the Stairs; it would seem ungentlemanly to note the actress appears to have put on weight for the role, were that weight gain not typical of the film's attitude towards the "ordinary girl" Florence: characterised as clumsy and snacking, easy to get drunk and to get pregnant.
Greenberg is at its most Californian here and in its final movement towards growth and resolution (where a true mumblecore auteur - a Swanberg or a Bujalski - would be perfectly content with stasis). If you are going to appropriate mumblecore, then for heaven's sake don't use it to attempt a noodly remake of As Good As It Gets, complete with a selfless madonna substitute throwing herself at the feet of (and thus saddling herself with) a martyr of the modern world. For all Greenberg's claims to indie authenticity, it's finally undermined by the epic egos at work behind the camera.
For a while, I was baffled as to why Baumbach should have attributed carpentry skills to Greenberg, a man otherwise reluctant to connect with or touch anyone or anything. Belatedly, the character's ability to hang a picture squarely on a wall comes to serve as a signifier of mounting stability, yet it was 45 minutes from the end of this generally joyless experience that I realised carpenter had become as symbolic a profession in Baumbach's film as those of architect or boatbuilder have in conventional romantic drama. Greenberg shouldn't be called Greenberg. For a variety of reasons, it should have been called: Christ.
Greenberg is on selected release.
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