Movie Review: Greenberg

LITTLE ROCK — You’ve probably known people like Roger Greenberg. Damaged, fortyish folks who - despite their obvious intelligence and talent - have never quite come to grips with the world that confronts them. Maybe something went wrong with their lives a long time ago, something that deflected their course and embittered them. They live like spoiled children, sponging off their family and friends. They are the people you try to help - who frustrate you by repaying your kindness with sarcasm and a sort of brutal “honesty” that in a more genteel age would be considered rude.

You’re not supposed to like Ben Stiller as Greenberg, only to recognize him. His life went wrong; he has recently emerged from a mental hospital and, for the time being, he’s housesitting his younger brother’sHollywood mansion. Greenberg works, he says, as a carpenter back home in Brooklyn, but you have the feeling that it’s just the latest disguise he’s trying on. While his brother is on vacation in Vietnam, maybe he’ll build a doghouse for the family’s German shepherd. But mostly he’s working hard at “doing nothing” these days.

There are lots of words for what Greenberg is, and most of them can’t be printed in a family newspaper. He doesn’t drive - though he used to, he grew up in Southern California - and when he wades into his brother’s swimming pool, the best he can manage is a pathetic dog paddle. He has trouble with the simplest sort of interpersonal transactions. Passive-aggressive, he communicates in snipes and snark. He’s a mean and snarling coward, a stunted egoist with an almost pathological lack of empathy.

Does this sound like anyone you’d want to watch a movieabout?

It’s perfectly understandable that you might want to take a pass on Noah Baumbach’s latest examination of the human heart. But Greenberg is in some ways a very funny movie, although I’m not sure you could call it comedy. Its characters aren’t larger than life, instead they seem quite calibrated and specific, thwarted perhaps, but drawn from life. This is an actors’ movie, and the characters portrayed here are authentic, at least to my experience.

Baumbach’s script is sketchy, with an ending that, while it admits a little hope, feels contrived and tacked on. The story is attributed to him and his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who appears in a rathersmall role as Greenberg’s old girlfriend, a woman who tellingly seems to have forgotten most of what was “a big relationship” for him. It’s easy to imagine that the film was made up as the actors played along, like the mumblecore films that obviously influenced it.

Greta Gerwig, who plays Florence, the sweet numb personal assistant with whom Greenberg conducts something like an affair, made her name in mumblecore touchstones like 2007’s Hannah Takes the Stairs and 2008’s Baghead; Mark Duplass, one of the genre’s leading lights, also shows up as one of Greenberg’s old friends.

Stiller has done good dramatic work before - most notably in Permanent Midnight(1998) - but it has been awhile since he has played a character as subtle as this. Greenberg could have been a mass of nervy tics and flashing stares, but, for the most part, Stiller tones down the madman act, giving us a coolly brittle performance as a man whose biggest problem seems to be the inability to acknowledge his own ridiculousness.

But it’s Gerwig who rescues the film from irretrievable bleakness. Seemingly painfully aware of her own limitations, quietly reeling from a broken relationship, she sees something in the reprehensible Greenberg that he can’t. And in the end, maybe she saves him, though knowing Roger Greenberg as I do, I doubt it.