Greenberg

"Well, I made a reassessment of the movie Wall Street, among other things."

With the possible exception of Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach's movies revel in human carnage. Their claustrophobic worlds smolder in the damage that people inflict in and on one another, but they burn so quietly and so gradually that eventually you, like their sad inhabitants, come to mistake impotence for inevitability. Life can change so slowly that it appears never to change. And all the while we're wrecked inside, desperate to reconstitute our bodies but unable to bury their ruins, reluctant to live. Afraid to let memory be memory. Afraid not to mourn.

Greenberg is the best movie I've seen this year. Much of its force the movie gleans from its script, which is perfectly honed and nearly faultless but also effortless and spontaneous. Baumbach's candid refusal to push the film in any particular narrative direction lends its tone a refreshing, and sometimes infuriating, authenticity. Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig both deliver stunning performances, an accomplishment all the more difficult for their characters' respective handicaps: abusive narcissism and self-destruction. As Roger Greenberg, a more mature incarnation of the Jeff Daniels father from The Squid and the Whale, but with greater nuance and sensitivity, Stiller plays an utterly unlikeable and abrasive man, but he nevertheless builds a credible bond with his audience that carries our interest throughout the film.

Viewers will notice similarities between Greenberg and Margot at the Wedding, though the former is more fastidious, more sober, and more trying even than the latter. In part this added difficulty comes from Greenberg's looser, more improvised focus. And although it uses the frame of the brother's vacation as a structure, the movie, much less than Margot at the Wedding, freely develops its textual space in a relaxed and naturalistic rhythm. Its confederated form, in fact, drives Greenberg, as nearly occurs in The Squid and the Whale, toward a resolution so personal and so psychologically real that it, like any actual experience, fails to resolve in the static, climactic style we habitually associate with movies (even "artistic" ones). Consult your own life. When you experience an emotion or thought, or become the object of a fateful force, so overwhelming that it revolutionizes your sense of self, emotion and thought, and fate, and experience itself seem to stop; time and memory cohere. But in no sense is life concluded. On the contrary, even in the brief moment of coherence, when intelligence is satisfied and desire suspended, one feels an indefinite engine, like a furnace, driving life forward, consuming the precious stillness, transforming its peace into heat and turmoil.

Consistently Baumbach challenges his peers by taking seriously the premises of his movies. A stranger comes to town. Okay. He's recently released from a psychiatric hospital. Okay. He suffers from crippling behavioral and mental problems. Okay. Film it. We get no guarantee that events will add up to something, that psychic breakthroughs will be lasting and curative, that the lonely will find love and the sick be restored mens sana in corpore sano. In the real world, niceties don't happen. Of course, people do occasionally recover from illness or forge meaningful relationships, but they also die, as Hemingway told, so the story ends badly. Life can only disappoint. We're weak creatures, and we humiliate ourselves and our friends, pretending we've conquered death and madness. Lying to be strong.

The brilliance of Greenberg, like that of The Squid and the Whale, lies with Baumbach's gentle acceptance of these truths. Things, quite simply, are this way. We can cause ourselves more grief and disaster by resisting, or we can let go and be neither happy nor unhappy, just being. Sometimes, like when you do cocaine with teenagers who feed your dying dog pizza, life is benign and maybe even a little funny. Other times, like when you're staring at the giant inflatable man from the backseat of a car on its way to the airport, it's horrible and worse, somehow, than indifferent. Roll with it. As Ivan says, it's hard, embracing the life you never expected. A