Another entry in Noah Baumbach's rough guide to the modern American narcissist, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a kingdom unto himself. Terminally self-conscious and yet brutally un-self-aware, stunted and solipsistic to the point of generating his own toxic atmosphere, he is -- or should be -- the cautionary middle-aged male. At 41 he is recovering from the nervous breakdown that his distant ancestors Holden Caulfield and Hal Incandenza had upon coming of age. Greenberg is of that generation that forgot to officially acknowledge adulthood's arrival -- whether with a child or a career or a drop-in at an asylum -- and the reckoning is humiliating indeed. Recently released from a hospital in New York and minding his brother Phillip's Los Angeles compound while he and his family are off in Vietnam (one in a series of oblique and overt '70s references, the idea of a young man traveling to Saigon to build a hotel is played for one of the film's typically sidelong laughs), Greenberg is tasked with some basics: build a doghouse; see old friends; try not to be such a five-alarm asshole.
That last one is not officially on the list, but it is the covert agenda Baumbach sets for his titular protagonist; once acquainted with the breadth of Greenberg's billowing ego, even the infinitesimal progress made by movie's end seems unlikely. Easier to like but no less formidable is Florence (Greta Gerwig), the personal assistant to the LA Greenbergs. Genuinely good-natured and yet prone to a concerted affability -- she's so agreeable as to be completely inscrutable -- Florence is a young woman navigating her own need with the kind of guileless curiosity she brings to everything she does. From the first shots of the film, which hold her in tight profile as she maneuvers calmly through LA traffic, Florence is found to live quite naturally, if somewhat ambi-directionally, in the present. Greenberg, by contrast, is trapped in the dilapidated quarters of a lightly sketched history (after leaving LA a failed musician he became a carpenter), and roams the grounds of his past like a deposed monarch.
Brought together by the care and feeding of the family dog, Mahler, and the endless errand run that seems to be life in LA, Florence and Greenberg make it through a generic initial exchange without ever really acknowledging each other: it's perfect. Even better is the children's party sequence that reunites Greenberg with former bandmates Ivan (Rhys Ifans) and Eric (Mark Duplass), and old girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also conceived the story with husband Baumbach). More successful at translating Greenberg's anxious self-direction than his obsessive ChapStick use and a letter-writing habit (he can't have an interaction with the world without taking pen to paper to protest it) is Baumbach's deftly impressionistic cutting between the strained, pro forma conversations Greenberg has with the people who used to shape his life. The evident resentment of his bandmates (he pulled a major boner at a critical moment in their career) and Beth's complete de-investment in their relationship are brought to bear later in the film with similarly gratifying skill.
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.