Will Boy Get Girl? Do We Care?

Recently released from an “asylum� (Don’t people today use more PC euphemisms?) after a “nervous breakdown,� Greenberg (Ben Stiller) has come from the Big Apple to Hollywood for an extended stay, housesitting at his brother’s mansion and aggressively seeking to “do nothing.�

   He’s carrying a lot of baggage.  He’s had a failed relationship with Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who co-wrote the movie with husband Noah Baumbach) and nixed a recording contract with his band of best friends Ivan (Rhys Ifans) and Johno (Jake Paltrow).

    Everyone else seems to have moved on except Greenberg, who traded his guitar for a carpenter’s bag, swapped coasts, and terminated his social maturation somewhere around age 13.     

   “You know the saying: Youth is wasted on the young,â€� says Ivan; “I’d take that further,â€� Greenberg responds in one of the movie’s funnier lines,  “Life is wasted on people.â€�

   Faster than you can say “The Squid and the Whaleâ€� (director Baumbach’s best-known flick), Greenberg is hitting on his brother’s much younger “family assistant,â€� Florence (Greta Gerwig), herself something of a sweetly undervalued nebbish bouncing from failed relationship to one-night stand and now, presto, to Greenberg.

   Will neurotic guy get neurotic girl, and vice versa?

   This is the kind of thing Woody Allen did with a lot more aplomb and tons more humor way back when.

   My problem with Stiller, to be perfectly frank, is he’s so unappealing. He’s able to play off this in good comedies such as “There’s Something About Mary,â€� or even middling ones like the “Night at the Museumâ€� series. But Greenberg is meant to be a complicated man-child whose next move will shock, offend, make you laugh, or all three at once. So Stiller furrows his brow to signify when he’s being vulnerable, and then turns on a dime and does something with comedic deadpan, or rips off a nasty one-liner.  There’s too much thrown at Stiller’s character to make him cohesive, and he’s working here without a net.

    I didn’t see the critically acclaimed “Squid,â€� but Baumbach’s sexual politics in “Greenbergâ€� are questionable. He emphasizes Florence’s “realâ€� qualities: Her hair is limp and her figure, square.  We get that she’s no West Coast airhead or shark.   But what then?  She has to settle for a recovering lunatic with anger-management problems?  Baumbach seems to want us to identify with her because she’s a loser who can take unlimited abuse and still see the heart of gold beneath the nut job.

   That he almost succeeds is due in large part to Gerwig, who makes her character splendidly real.

   There are scenes of searing emotional honesty in “Greenberg,â€� and a dozen or so funny lines and sight gags, but they don’t quite add up. Too often the movie is painful to watch, and plenty of would-be humor falls flat. At the end I felt a pleasant sense of closure, initially, I thought, because we had resolved the age-old question, “Does guy get girl?â€�

    Then I realized I was just glad it was over.

 

“Greenbergâ€� is rated R for some strong sexuality, drug use, and language.  

It is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington.

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