A Second Look: ‘Greenberg’

Since his 2005 critical breakthrough “The Squid and the Whale,” writer-director Noah Baumbach has specialized in protagonists who lack an internal censor, who veer between paralyzing self-consciousness and total self-absorption, whose general demeanor falls somewhere between unpleasant and insufferable. This seemingly perverse compulsion has made Baumbach something of an anomaly in the landscape of American cinema, where most movies, even if they don’t trade on the charm of their heroes, at least count on their protagonists as easy points of identification.

In the semi-autobiographical “Squid,” a sad, funny story of a bitter divorce as experienced by two young brothers, Jeff Daniels steals his every scene as the blustery patriarch, a novelist whose professional failures are fuel for both his self-pity and his self-regard. In “Margot at the Wedding” (2007), Nicole Kidman’s title character is also a narcissistic fiction writer, liable to treat family trauma and dysfunction with a vampiric eye, as fodder for her work.

Baumbach’s latest movie, “Greenberg” — which opened to generally favorable reviews this year and is out on regular definition and Blu-ray DVD this week — features his most abject antihero yet: Roger Greenberg, a 40-year-old carpenter and former musician recovering from a nervous breakdown. He’s played by Ben Stiller, grayer and more haggard than we’ve ever seen him, and gamely pushing his trademark comedy of mortification well over into the dark side.

After several years in New York, Roger is back in Los Angeles to housesit for his vacationing brother. Despite his stated intention to “do nothing” while in town, Roger can’t stop himself from revisiting old crime scenes; cue train wreck encounters with an ex-flame (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and former bandmates (Rhys Ifans, Mark Duplass). But most of his time is spent half-heartedly pursuing his brother’s sweetly awkward personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), who has kindly agreed to chauffeur him around (Roger doesn’t drive) and who is rewarded with one of the most passive-aggressive anti-courtships in screen history.

Brittle and anxious, comically prone to nursing his grievances (his favorite pastime is writing letters of complaint), Roger is a quintessential Baumbach creation. As such, he also openly invites a criticism that routinely comes up among Baumbach’s detractors: Why does this filmmaker persist in creating characters many of us would cross the street to avoid in real life?

Baumbach’s defenders would respond that at their best, his films are not just brutally funny but also brutally incisive. He has a naturalistic ear for dialogue but also a knack for crystallizing a psychopathology, an entire system of neuroses and obsessions, into a single phrase or gesture, as when, for instance, Roger plays Albert Hammond’s sappy “It Never Rains in Southern California” for Florence and instructs her on the proper appreciation: “You have to get past the kitsch.”

It’s no coincidence that the funniest (and most painful) scenes in “Greenberg” take place at parties — Baumbach’s characters are fundamentally lonely people who are their most stricken and combustible in social situations. At a chaotic children’s birthday party, at his own birthday dinner where he’s surprised with a cake (bad idea), at a house party full of teenagers where he ill-advisedly mixes Zoloft and cocaine, Roger goes from defense to offense on the turn of a dime, channeling his insecurity into fits of casual cruelty.

Having started as a sardonic chronicler of post collegiate ennui (with “Kicking and Screaming” and “Mr. Jealousy”), Baumbach has not only broadened his emotional scope but also grown as a filmmaker, helped along by a fruitful partnership on his last two films with the gifted cinematographer Harris Savides (whose credits include “Zodiac” and “Milk”). For “Margot,” Savides used old lenses and shot largely with available light to get the slightly ominous look of a horror movie (which the film is, in a sense). “Greenberg” is the first of Baumbach’s six films to be set in Los Angeles, and Savides effortlessly captures the uneasy languor of the smoggy city, a reflection of Roger’s internal weather.

It is too easy to accuse a director of misanthropy simply because his characters are hard to like. Baumbach’s creations are exaggerated for comic and dramatic effect, but the degree to which he tries to understand them and encourages us to do so can only be called compassionate.

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