In Theaters: Greenberg

All the while Florence -- sturdy, sympathetic, and oddly drawn to Greenberg -- offers her support. She responds to Greenberg's random, afterthought advances with an almost heartbreaking pliability: now he's speaking her language. At 25, she is still young enough to mistake complete apathy ("I'm really trying to do nothing for a while," is Greenberg's refrain) for a form of bravery and gracious enough to ignore his petty aggressions. Greenberg greets these rather serendipitous tendencies (I'd love to cast irrevocable doubt on the coupling, but as a former 25-year-old woman I can only nod sadly) with a hostility that seems to grow in relation to Florence's perceived vulnerability. He's a dick, in other words, and he can't deal, making terrible decisions right up to the bittersweet end. But it all sounds pretty (James Murphy's buoyant, playful score develops an ingenious dynamic with the diegetic music), and Harris Savide's assured and yet agile camerawork frames the world of unfamous Angelenos with uncommon warmth. Gerwig is striking in the role of the unlikely ingenue, her face and body slack and impassive one moment, radiantly expressive the next, and Stiller plunges pretty fearlessly into barely redeemed unlikability.

It's the "barely" that seems to me to raise the key question that lingers over Baumbach's latest work. As Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, "the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool," and Baumbach, while seeming to traffic in erudite critiques of that attitude, with a third go around comes uncomfortably close to reinforcing it. Watching Greenberg I got the eerie feeling that its hero is the kind of post-modern self-dramatist who has envisioned for himself exactly the kind of unsparing but often quite graceful cinematic portrait Baumbach has rendered. Baumbach's is actually the aesthetic of choice for today's man-child: I know at least a dozen Greenbergs who would eagerly (and faux-ruefully) describe themselves as Baumbach characters. That's the problem with narcissism: it can turn anything, even the putative skewering Baumbach has given his middling artists in The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding, into nourishment.

And so a week after viewing and quite enjoying this well-made but ultimately slight character study, like a big old square I am nagged by its intentions. Are we supposed to find Greenberg interesting because he's empty and cripplingly self-involved, to the point that even the slightest parting of the clouds constitutes a triumph? Or is the startling fidelity with which his condition is portrayed meant to mortify and instruct exactly the kind of man who would greet such a critique with deflective knowing? It is the latter option that concerns me more, because if Greenberg not only fails to confront the Greenbergs of the world with their pitiless reflections but in fact validates them under the cover of confrontation, Baumbach's narcissism project has gone right through the looking glass. Fie to that, I say, and gather ye Gerwigs while ye may.

Pages: 1 2