Greenberg

(Greta Gerwig and Ben Stiller in the Noah Baumbach/Jennifer Jason Leigh production, Greenberg. Images courtesy of Focus Features.)

“You don’t realize how much you like me,” says Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), a hesitant, dreamy, beautiful young woman caught in a dissonant, back and forth relationship with Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), in Noah Baumbach’s enthralling new movie, Greenberg.

Stiller is the nominative star and eponymous figure of Baumbach’s sixth feature. For my money it’s Gerwig, a major player in the mumblecore movement and the movies of Joe Swanberg, who makes this movie sing.

Like Laura Linney’s bravura work in The Squid and the Whale and Nicole Kidman’s astonishing turn in Margot at the Wedding, Gerwig is granted a fullness of expression that’s rare and invigorating. She’s studded with contradictions, insecurities, frustrations, ambition but also allowed some nicely individuated personal traits, like the way she talks to other drivers as she negotiates the Los Angeles traffic.

This is the first of the Baumbach’s movies set in Los Angeles. Baumbach worked on the script with his wife, the great Jennifer Jason Leigh. She helped conceive the story and produced the film. Some of the key scenes also take place in the house of her mother, the writer Barbara Turner (an important Robert Altman collaborator). Shot by the great Harris Savides, the movie has a relaxed, observational style, like Altman’s The Long Goodbye, implicit in the opening shot, a smog-lined shot of the Hollywood Hills.

Gerwig gives it all a complexity that gains a beautiful sharpness and density. Florence is the personal assistant of a Hollywood Hills architect (Chris Messina) who’s decamped, with his family, for an extended Vietnam vacation. His brother, Roger, is the guest resident of the house, and it falls upon Florence to help him cope. Roger, it turns out, was a musician of some ability who screwed up a recording deal and has now exiled himself in New York, where he works as a carpenter and is now recovering from a nervous breakdown that required hospitalization.

(“A mental patient just went down on you,” my favorite line in the movie, heard over the phone, uttered by Florence’s best friend, after the first of several awkward trysts by the couple.) The movie has some quiet, plaintive moments that nicely contrast the more abrasive and prickly material. Early on, Florence picks up a guy her own age at a gallery opening and they head back for sex. “I just got out of a relationship,” she says. “This isn’t a relationship,” he responds.

It doesn’t end just there. There’s a beautifully tender moment seconds later where the camera pulls tight of her face, and we’re invited to watch her, not sexually or voyeuristically, but to understand, emotionally, her anxiousness and unsettledness and her need for emotional contact, however fleeting. Whether it’s improvised or not, Gerwig reaches over, to this virtual stranger she is sharing the bed with, and she softly caresses the nape of his neck. Again, it’s a soft, quiet moment, but it is consistent with the movie’s observational subtlety.

After the hard, exacting angles of Linney and Kidman, it’s good to encounter somebody more fluid, open, even uncertain about who they are. Part of what made those performances so exhilarating was the fearlessness of the actors and their outright refusal to soften or make palatable their vanity or self-regard. By the same token, Gerwig is unafraid to come off as occasionally weak (especially the times when she passively takes Greenberg’s punishing putdowns or obnoxiousness), vulnerable or lonely. There’s a moment she sings open mike at a club; again, it’s not very good, technically, but I didn’t care. I was taken for a loop, especially Savides’ spontaneous and alert camera.

Greenberg is very good at atomizing social discourse, especially capturing the frayed, difficult, funny, exasperating ties between friends who’ve been out of touch or former lovers trying to make some tentative sense of reconciliation (a depressingly acute moment occurs when Greenberg makes a failed pass at his old girlfriend, sharply played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, at a restaurant, the dead, awkward space brilliantly conveyed in the tangled body language). Rhys Ifans, an actor I typically find way too mannered for my own taste, is terrific as well as Greenberg’s best friend, a former member of the band who’s trying to find a way to balance Greenberg’s more anarchic impulses against his own deep seated need for stability and responsibility.

(In one of his final reviews at Variety, Todd McCarthy talked about the film as a quintessential Los Angeles movie, and I think the movie’s particularly good at the perverse rituals of personal address and how people there talk, or don’t talk, with another, always knotted up by the past, social status, ambition, personal animus and shifting fields of need, desire, longing and the constant refusal to not be seen as weak.)

The autobiographical strain that colors most of the director’s work is partly what accounts for the unusual tenseness and emotional intensity. One of the best ways to look at the film, I think, is to imagine the major players here, minus Florence, as older iterations of Baumbach’s debut, Kicking and Screaming.

Many critics, like David Denby, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, have acknowledged the movie’s debt to Saul Bellow’s great novel Herzog. (This is the second major work, following the Coens' A Serious Man, that qualifies as Bellovian.) 

That protagonist, Moses Herzog, also wrote funny, outrageous letters of complaint. (My favorite was the one to the Chicago department store explaining why he did not feel responsible, legally or otherwise, to pay off his ex-wife’s charge card.) There are other connections worth exploring. Some of the best writing in the novel is Bellow’s astonishingly evocative details about what it was like growing up poor in the Jewish ghettos of Montreal. Herzog’s sense of outrage and dread developed out of his need not only to re-invent himself, but flee from any sign of his socially embarrassing origins. Likewise, Greenberg has spent most of his life in some form of retreat.

In the novel, Moses has his share of amorous relationships and flings (like one that I fully understand with a Polish beauty whose command of English is so tenuous they write each other in French). Greenberg, both movie and lead, is also willfully obstinate and difficult on the subject of women.

But the remarkable phone message he leaves Florence is proof of his own mortality, a sign to come in from the cold. At times Greta Gerwig's invisible technique makes it appear the very opposite, a formlessness. That is very impressive acting in a beautiful, tough, tender and very smart film.

(Closing time: Ben Stiller, as the eponymous Greenberg.)