Greenberg worked its sneaky magic on me the way many favorites have done. Viewing # 1 yielded a response of “Well, this is kind of enjoyable.” With Viewing #2, it turned into “Boy, this is pretty damn good.” And a few days after that second viewing I did a double-take (see: Sitcoms, Cheesy 90s Ones) and realized it had crawled through the back window and was now here, for good, among my favorite movies. Well.
Oh, it’s not for everyone. And it’s not a knock-you-out film that changes the trajectory of the medium; it’s not The Seventh Seal or 2001 or anything. But boy does it appeal to me at this point in my life.
There’s a certain kind of person who has no patience for the type of character that Ben Stiller’s Roger Greenberg is (depressed, narcissistic, whatever you want to call him), and that’s okay. “Get over it!” they might shout. I often feel that when a work of art doesn’t appeal to someone, it is because the subject matter/character dilemma/theme is either before them or behind them on their own (spiritual?) path, if you’ll allow me such a quick, elementary, not-thought-out, abstract thought.
The Passage of Time doesn’t seem to please Greenberg. Hey, maybe that’s what he’s most angry about. He goes with his friend to another friend’s house for a barbecue. It ends up being a children’s party, and Incense and Peppermints is playing, which seems to have switched ownership from the hippie to the kiddie, and although it’s not commented upon, it probably annoys Roger.
“I’m a carpenter,” he says, and quickly adds, “you know, for money,” as if there’s some kind of artistic carpentry fad that is frowned upon. Beth, an ex-girlfriend from his days when he was in a band, is getting a divorce. He says he’s just trying to do nothing, which is a curious phrase he repeats during the movie. “That’s brave at our age,” she says. Greenberg had been in a hospital for some sort of nervous breakdown that’s never clarified, although he doesn’t drive and says he once went through a period where he couldn’t move his legs.
The next scene is one that I like, so let me describe it, because I think its little details not only tell a lot about the characters but are also more or less ‘the meat’ of a kind of movie like this.
But first, let me introduce the character of Florence, who is the next significant character. Florence, played by Greta Gerwig, is a girl you know. Pretty but not a movie star, a little pudgy, and a tad short on self-esteem. Her voice seems to rise and fall at the wrong times, but this is consistent with her character, who is always a bit “awkward” (if you were her friend, you’d probably select that adjective for her before others); and she is seemingly not a fan of what she’s doing in the moment she does it. But Florence appears relatively okay with life (at first glance), takes joy in the children and the dog. I first saw Greta Gerwig in the highly-improvised ‘Hannah Takes The Stairs,’ a movie I can’t not champion for its realistic feel of my generation, but which was ultimately not about much. Here she’s finally paired up with a script and director who know what to do with her.
So anyways, onto that scene.
Roger calls up Florence, and asks if she’d like to get a drink. She says sure. “Is there a bar you know we can go to?” “There’s one near my apartment but it’s pretty lame,” she says. We expect her next line to be a suggestion of a better venue, but instead she says, “It’s in Culver City, do you want to meet me there?” which is kind of hilarious, because she seems to just accept the bar’s “lameness” as part of her life. Yup, that’s her bar. The lame one.
Well, Roger can’t drive, so she’ll have to pick him up. Her car’s CD collection is “cheesy,” she forgets her purse (“What girl does that?” you might ask, but it fits her character) and they go back. “I don’t read enough,” she says as they arrive, as if in anticipation of Roger noticing a dearth of quality literature. Her apartment has enough of a feminine touch to not be uninviting, but it’s still the lair of a twenty-something. She shows him the puppets she bought for her 4 year old niece, who she wants to have a relationship with but who’s “just not that friendly” with her. Still, Florence sticks a piece of the girl’s artwork on her fridge.
Oh, the bar’s probably “full of bridge and tunnel people.” So they stay, split a Corona Light by the fridge, and after one sip apiece he kisses her. A bit premature, but hey, it’s reciprocated. So they stagger toward her unmade bed, which is about two feet to the left, and he starts to work the shirt up. “I’m wearing an ugly bra,” she says, “it doesn’t have a clasp.” “It’s like an ACE bandage,” he reports, not sarcastically. Oh well. She falls back, and he surprisingly lifts up her skirt and goes to town in the nether region as she removes a newspaper from under her. She starts to breathe a little heavier, but it seems like she’s getting a bit alone up there. A bit too much time to think. “Do you hear a train?” she asks. “Is that a train?” She sits up. “I get kind of nerdy.”
She nows says she’d just like to take it slow, just ended a relationship, and doesn’t want to go from “just having sex to just having sex to just having sex.” He ask who the third ‘just having sex’ is. “You,” she says, “if we had sex.” The second was a guy she met at “this gallery thing.” He asks, “How did it go,” her expression being priceless (a flash of a sort of fatigued hopelessness) before responding to no surprise that it was “pretty awkward.” Well, no shit. He retreats to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror, and comes back. She’s in an old lady’s housecoat, smoking, and says she has to call “Gina.” There’s an awkward discussion of him walking home, her driving him, or him taking a cab. She gives him a flyer of when she’s singing, although the address was printed incorrectly.
He says they shouldn’t do this cause she works for his brother, plus he’s just trying to do nothing right now, and she says she shouldn’t do stuff cause it feels good. The scene ends, although Florence is briefly shown on the phone, talking to the aforementioned Gina, her assumed BFF, who points out that a crazy person just went down on her. Florence says he seems vulnerable, but points out his age of 40 with a slight guiltiness but also a kind of pity for him (not a pity that he’s old, but probably a pity that at 40 he’s still splitting Corona Lights by the fridge and progressing to oral sex after one sip).
So. We have that scene. Which I rather like. It’s about 5 minutes or so, but I feel like it’s jam-packed with accurate characterization. I didn’t quite like the scene the first time I saw it, thinking it was another movie in which two people “hooked up” without knowing each other. But I like the scene now.
Noah Baumbach has become, in the last few months, one of my favorite filmmakers of the past 15 years or so. He’s not a stylist like his sometimes-co-writer Wes Anderson, but he understands character and dialogue, and his characters are of a similar personality and temperament to myself so that I can’t help but look to them for some kind of illumination into my own life.
And so, when watching Baumbach and Stiller give an interview with Charlie Rose, I had in interesting realization. Baumbach said that Greenberg is a character that doesn’t really accept his current life, and seems to hold it up to some kind of expected/hypothetical life that he imagined for himself at an earlier moment. Aah! I think I’m doing this too, and always kind of have.
