“I’m really trying to do nothing right now,” the middle-aged Roger Greenberg likes to tell his acquaintances. For such a high-powered town, LA tends to come off like a slacker paradise on film, layabouts floating from one midnight party to another lazy afternoon, casualizing everything sincere and intimate in order to maintain distance. Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg kind of expertly develops this slice of Lalaland life in order to explore delayed onset adulthood.
Roger Greenberg needs a kick in the pants, though, if he’s serious about changing his life for the better, and Ben Stiller is exceptional playing him as a prickly, pathetic, and self-loathing Kafka hero. We’re not at all amused by Roger’s antics, but he thinks he’s “weirdly on tonight.” Enter Greta Gerwig as his brother’s personal assistant Florence, a breezy bohemian type herself who falls for Roger somewhat inexplicably, but isn’t that how attraction works? See, Roger’s fresh out of a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown, and he could use some lessons in socialization. Florence is a bit of a doormat, but she seems to know what she’s doing. What Roger and Florence share is a dependency on psychoanalysis, as if they’re play-by-playing events as they happen.
From the setup, you might expect to learn more about Roger’s mental history, to see Florence and Roger grow with each other, and to see at least hints of redemption. Greenberg doesn’t care what you want, almost immediately sloughing any desire to behave like an adult narrative, and, like life, it stops more than it ends. It might be Noah Baumbach’s most impressively written film, not as discretely structured (or gut-bustingly funny) as Kicking and Screaming, not as overbearingly claustrophobic as The Squid and the Whale, and while its denizens are dissatisfied bourgeois postadolescents, they’re not as eyeball-puncturingly hateful as those in Margot at the Wedding.
Like its stunted protagonist, a kid from Kicking and Screaming who fell through the cracks for two more decades without anyone forcing him to grow up—Roger tells Florence, “A shrink told me once I have trouble living in the present so I linger on the past because I feel like I never really lived it in the first place”—Baumbach's script evokes real-life aimlessness and its attendant anxiety less self-consciously than many mumblecore or Whit Stillman entries. Greenberg wouldn’t have a plot if its protagonist didn’t have friends to make him do things. Ambling along a relaxed surf town with no attachments, it’s The Long Goodbye without the intrigue, The Big Lebowski before a Chinaman pees on the rug.
As a portrait of passive narcissism, Greenberg is stunning. Baumbach’s trademark non sequiturs have purpose, nearly always attempts by characters to be seen as charmingly thoughtful. For instance, at an uncomfortable party, Roger quips that “all the men out here dress like children, and all the children dress like superheroes,” promptly scanning to see if he scored any laughs. Natural light and earth tones complement the vintage hipster paraphernalia on parade, richly framing the cast of indie regulars (Chris Messina, Mark Duplass) and alt-cable actors (Brie Laron, Merritt Wever). And Baumbach regular/wife Jennifer Jason Leigh capably tells her whole story in just two or three scenelets.
Greenberg is the kind of film that sneaks up on you. At first, it was a tour of scenes from the life of a self-saboteur, alternately awkward and carefree, but never much more than a superbly realized character study. But then you feel the cumulative weight of the thing, and marvel at its nonconformity, and ponder its meanings. It quibbles with therapy culture while acquiescing that coping with modern life is actually pretty hard, it’s about the lengthening of childhood and procrastinated maturity, it exposes the inferiority complex of comparing yourself with others while suggesting nobody really has their priorities in place, it has some intriguing summary conclusions about the youngest generation that may not hold water, and it criticizes the overwhelming inundation of advice on how to live from people, magazines, whatever. The more I think about Greenberg, the more I uncover about its examination of coming of age in 2010, and it’s all couched in this slacker persona of a haphazardly assembled assortment of scenes. Plenty of minimalist faux-indies struggle to precisely capture real life. Because it know it’s imperfect, Greenberg’s free to succeed.
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