Roger Greenberg, the title character of Noah Baumbach’s new film, is neurotic, aimless, and forty. Played by a gaunt and graying Ben Stiller, he jilted his fellow band members fifteen years ago on the eve of a promising record contract, and has since then languished as a carpenter, a career for which he is overqualified (in his mind) and ill-suited, given his fidgety hands and flimsy personality.
The story begins when he returns to Los Angeles to house-sit for his brother. In the vague but recent past he was institutionalized, though for what it remains unclear. Back home the prodigal Greenberg encounters a slew of people he once called friends, all of whom are either inspired or disconcerted by the fact that he is “really trying to do nothing.” At an acquaintance’s pool party he tries to play the Rip Van Winkle role, commenting on how strange everything has become in his absence. “All the men dress like children and all the children dress like clowns,” he says of the guests, as though he had stumbled upon some grotesque distortion of Lake Wobegon. The truth, of course, is that Greenberg is the oddity, anachronistic in his flared pants and rust-colored down vest, out of touch in his humor, and alone by the side of the pool.
In looks and maturity his foil is Ivan (Rhys Ifans), the tall, bearded Brit who once fronted their band and who now fixes computers and eschews booze as he tries to raise a son and salvage a marriage. “It’s huge, to embrace the life you never thought you’d live,” he says. They’re sad words, a memoriam for a rock career that died in the garage, but he speaks them with more satisfaction than regret, hoping that Roger will take heed. But they’re at a party; Greenberg’s on cocaine, and he can’t grasp the profundity of Ivan’s sacrifice, or, for that matter, the name of his son.
In lieu of embracing a woman or a career, Greenberg has devoted himself to the mastery of nothing, a pursuit he sees as noble, if quixotically so. Throughout the film, he only does two things of substance: he writes letters to corporations about the dehumanizing effects of their services, and commences a fumbling relationship with Florence (Greta Gerwig in an excellent performance), his brother’s sexy personal assistant, who might nurse him back to normalcy. At first his quirks are endearing. When she asks if she can pick up some groceries for him, he gives her a one-item list: “ice cream sandwiches.” Then we learn he can’t drive. He hates birthdays. All affection repulses him. When she shows him love he jumps back, as he does when a newsletter publishes one of his correspondences; his skittishness suggests that any recognition of his existence, in print or in love, might somehow detract from his laudable nullity.
Ennui has long been the province of Noah Baumbach, who first explored the theme in Kicking and Screaming, a depiction of five listless liberal arts graduates flailing in their newfound freedom. Terrified of adulthood, they lurk behind a veneer of arcane pop-culture references and deadpan irony as they wonder whether anyone will notice that they, like the speaker of Stevie Smith’s poem, are “not waving but drowning.”
Roger Greenberg is what those characters might have become had they never learned to swim, and aptly he isn’t very aquatic. In six weeks of house-sitting he gets in the pool once, and his choppy crawl barely takes him the length of it. Ever since The Graduate, suburban swimming pools have symbolized angst and malaise, but for Greenberg the water takes on an oppressive and enervating force, one that prevents him from ferrying himself to the land of adulthood. His problems with swimming, literal and figurative, recall my own paradoxical swimming dilemma. When my mom signed me up for lessons as a five year old, I retorted, “Why did you sign me up for swim lessons? I don’t even know how to swim!” So too with Greenberg, who cannot try anything because he cannot do anything because he cannot try anything.
In The New York Times, Dennis Lim asserted that Greenberg refines the Stiller persona, which is both true and diagnostic of the film’s shortcomings. There is much of the preening Derek Zoolander in Greenberg (though Greenberg himself hates preening L.A. models) and even more of the stingy Chas Tenenbaum. Although it’s enjoyable to trace a character’s lineage through previous incarnations, Greenberg’s highly overt provenance displays Stiller’s tendency to play slight variations on himself. To be fair, this criticism should also be levied at Baumbach, the film’s auteur, and the man who has brought us course after course of unpalatable protagonists, from Jeff’s Daniels' faux-sophisticated academic in The Squid and the Whale to Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s squabbling sisters in Margot at the Wedding.
The challenge, of course, is to make these prickly relatives and pontificating fools oddly winsome. In Greenberg Baumbach again presents us with an incredibly unsavory lead, and again Stiller delivers as the finicky, spastic Jew who is somehow simultaneously endearing. He does so with such effectiveness you rarely notice his limited range, such does he warp the film’s tone to fit his persona. In the farcical Zoolander and the highly stylized Royal Tenenbaums, in which actors essentially became minarets, his manic caricatures jived with the ludicrous tones of the films. Yet Zoolander was light and the Tenenbaums were many; neither work truly taxed him.
Greenberg begs for a more human protagonist, a man whose despair we can feel. Roger is meant to be odd, but Stiller plays him a chromosome shy of Aspberger’s, and we never know whether to sympathize with his mental disorder or scorn his solipsism. What could have been a broad study of tragicomic anguish, much as Leaving Las Vegas was of alcoholism, instead funnels into the narrow conceit of another Stiller quirk-fest. It’s good, funny, sad, and replete with quotable lines, but throughout the film, you wish he would be slightly less of a child, slightly less of a clown. To paraphrase Ivan, you wish that he would embrace a role he hadn’t planned on playing.
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Now showing at the Regal Manor Twin.