Here’s a strange reaction: from all that I read about Ben Stiller’s performance in the title role in Greenberg, I was expecting his character would be a lot more unlikable.Not that Greenberg is necessarily likable either. He’s antisocial. He hates extending himself towards new people. He’s tactless, and dismisses anyone who gets offended by him as too uptight to handle his brutal honesty. He writes petty crank letters to airlines and coffee chains. He doesn’t drive, which in Los Angeles seems like a passive/aggressive way of getting his friends to be his personal chauffeur service. He doesn’t call his friends on their birthday. His best friend (Rhys Ifans) has a young son, but he never bothered to get to know him. He used to be part of a popular band, but sabotaged their dealings with a record company just when they were on the verge of landing a major-label deal. Now he’s 41 years old, fresh out of a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown. He works as a carpenter, but he likes to tell people he’s “into doing nothing right now” because he thinks it sounds cooler. He thinks watching a videotape of Gung Ho sounds like a great way to spend an afternoon with an old friend. He strikes up a relationship with a girl 15 years his junior (Greta Gerwig), maintaining a mean-to-her/nice-to-her ratio of roughly 80/20. Worst crime of all, he attends a house party and insists on playing Duran Duran’s Rio album when everyone else wants to hear AC/DC. He says it’s “great coke music.”
All that said, the reviews had led me to expect a character who is deliberately nasty, misanthropic, and abrasive, whereas Greenberg strikes me more as someone who can’t quite help himself. He’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is, and he’s not witty enough to come up with barbs that cut people very deep. (His sharpest turn of phrase in the entire movie is “Sit on my dick, asshole.”) He’s more of a bringdown, a party-pooper, an energy-suck. He takes all the fun out of the room. The only person who’s willing to stick around with him for any length of time is a doormat like Greta Gerwig’s character, who has virtually no energy to begin with. She has two lovemaking scenes with Stiller, and they’re enough to establish her as the most hilariously listless sex siren on movie screens today.
A lot of people who’ve watched writer/director Noah Baumbach’s last three films, The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and now Greenberg, come away wondering why anybody would want to spend two hours in the company of such horrible people. But Baumbach’s great gift is understanding the strange charisma that unpleasant people often possess, the way so many of them manage to keep a small but devoted circle of followers orbiting around them, unable to break free of their heavy gravitational pull. After all, Greenberg doesn’t send out any obvious danger signals — he’s handsome, he’s in shape, he’s good with his hands, he’s kind to animals. He doesn’t make any mean remarks when he spots all the John Mayer CDs in Gerwig’s car. (Of course, he does later describe her as the kind of girl who you’d get a crush on if you worked in the same office with her, but if you went out with her, you’d wonder if she was actually as pretty as you thought.) And there are occasional unguarded moments where he reveals that he knows what a failure he is — as when he tells Ifans he’s not living the life he planned on living and that “of course maybe” he’d handle the prospect of the record deal if he could do it all over. And there are all sorts of subtler moments in Stiller’s performance throughout the film leading up to that scene where you can see Greenberg wincing at everything he’s just said, as if to ask himself, “Why do I do these things?”
Still, those epiphanies are pretty small to be the only thing to take away from a 105-minute movie. With Stiller in the lead role and Harris Savides behind the camera (and admirably avoiding every Los Angeles visual cliché), Greenberg feels a bit like a mumblecore movie that’s gotten just a little too big for its britches. It’s occasionally rewarding but mostly trying, in much the same proportions that being friends with Greenberg is occasionally rewarding but mostly trying. Let's say roughly 80/20.
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