Noah Baumbach made a brilliant breakthrough five years ago with The Squid and the Whale, his superbly cheerless black comedy of family dysfunction, but two years later followed that up with a disappointing, over-mannered and over-cooked ensemble piece called Margot at the Wedding. Now he has rediscovered that difficult tonal register, the sophisticated music of disillusion and emotional vulnerability, in a tale of modern Los Angeles.
Greenberg is a nervous romance in the tradition of Annie Hall with a piquant generation gap that is not so much May-to-September as early-June to late-August, starring the prickly Ben Stiller and the gentle, likeable Greta Gerwig. Baumbach’s work has always been autobiographical; he has co-written the storyline for this new movie in partnership with his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who appears in the movie as the protagonist’s wary ex, and some of the film’s pleasure resides in speculating, just a little, about what the real story was and how and where it has been transformed.
Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a former LA musician who now lives in New York, working as a carpenter, and has just emerged from hospital following a breakdown. He has been invited back to house-sit the handsome LA home belonging to his hugely wealthy and successful brother Phillip (Chris Messina), while he and his family are in Vietnam, partly on holiday and partly, it seems, scouting locations for another of the boutique hotels in which Phillip has made his fortune.
Roger is a difficult personality: still in need of antidepressant medication but a bit of a drinker, not so secretly angry and disappointed about the way his life has turned out. Now a middle-aged man and still living like a student, Roger finds himself falling for Florence (Gerwig), his brother’s twentysomething personal assistant, who has dreams of being a singer. They are similar in a horribly ironic way but, unlike Roger’s dreams, hers could still come true — and the relationship is a minefield of inappropriateness, which at every turn reminds Roger and us of the disparity of what he hoped to be at this age and what he actually is.
Airily, he tells people at a party that he is trying to “do nothing” at the moment and is devastatingly told in reply that this is “brave — at our age”. Roger’s emotional double-whammy is discovering that he might be genuinely in love, at the same instant he realises that his career dreams are, definitively, over: he is here surrounded by the rich and successful, but his boat has sailed.
Roger is an exasperatingly hopeless case: he cannot drive in a city where cars are essential. In wealthy poolside LA he cannot even swim: there is a clever sequence in which he flounders, dog-paddles and all but drowns in Phillip’s pool while a helicopter clatters overhead like some karmic emergency vehicle. Everywhere there are signs of imminent disaster. Florence, instinctively compassionate and tolerant, looks after Roger, perhaps as a symptom of her own quarter-life crisis, perhaps in the same charitable spirit that she looks after the family dog Mahler.
There are eloquent separate scenes showing Florence and Roger simply walking: Florence walking the dog, and Roger toiling uphill with groceries — in LA the very act of walking has something ascetic about it, a vivid kind of poverty. Roger demonstrates his lack of status by yelling at a 4×4 in the street and then scuttling away in fear when the car stops and the driver threatens to get out.
I found Gerwig’s easygoing performance entirely authentic and unaffected; some may find it, and her, a little trying, and perhaps be agnostic about the “mumblecore” movies in which she made her name. I’m not being entirely facetious in saying that she has a kind of organic or farmer’s-market acting style, but Gerwig undoubtedly shows a naturalness and ease that, right about now, she shares with no other female star.
Rhys Ifans is excellent as Roger’s old buddy Ivan — another rehab graduate who must come to terms with never being a rock star. Jason Leigh makes her intriguing cameo as Roger’s former girlfriend Beth, with whom he has a tense and embarrassing catch-up lunch.
Stiller’s face is, as ever, eloquent of insecurity and eagerness, but here it has a gaunt and haunted look — especially when at one stage in his relationship with Florence he has to break off and go into her bathroom simply to look at his reflection in the mirror. Before he comes out he quickly flushes the lavatory to explain his absence and does it with his foot — a tellingly redundant, supposedly casual gesture of rock ‘n roll negligence.
What is he looking for? Signs that he is still young or that he is growing old? But these are signs that the bathroom mirror, like the apparently static minute-hand of a clock, can never show you. This is a movie about the awful shock of early middle age, the sudden realisation that you are not one of the young people any more. Like a wasp, it delivers a sharp sting of sadness. —