Word: baumbach
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...Chloe, the weekend's sole medium-size release, earned $1 million in 350 theaters. A sexual melodrama offering the glory of hot-sheets action between Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore, Chloe will never get near the numbers of a well-promoted movie from a major studio. Nor will Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, a potential-breakout romance that won a sheaf of favorable reviews and has an actual movie star, Ben Stiller, in the title role; it took in $1.1 million on 181 screens. The Runaways, starring Dakota Fanning and Twilight's Kristen Stewart, is already DOA after two weeks. About...
...head to explode and the entire audience to recoil in a collective say what? Should one judge a movie's artistic merits based on how annoyed you are by its characters? No. If likable is what you're looking for, it is inadvisable to trot off to see a Baumbach movie (Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale featured comparable creeps). That Greenberg has merits is undeniable. Gerwig, a funny mix of Kate Winslet and the joyfully ditzy young Diane Keaton, should end up a star. Stiller dials back his own schtick and deserves to be taken...
...years in New York. He's just gotten out of a mental institution and his intention is to spend at least six weeks dogsitting for his wealthy brother but otherwise doing exactly "nothing" - on purpose. "That's brave, at our age," observes his ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Baumbach's wife and story collaborator, here looking justifiably distracted). (See Ben Stiller as a Na'vi and other memorable Oscar moments...
...This conversation takes place at a casual garden party, one of the most skillfully edited scenes in the movie. Baumbach playfully plucks out Greenberg's main impressions of the party and stitches them together out of chronological order. First, Greenberg gets insulted, or so he thinks, by an old friend Eric (Humpday's Mark Duplass) whom he used to be in a band with until their big break was squashed by Greenberg's refusal to sign a record contract. Then he hears Beth is recently separated. A lightbulb goes on in his head - she might be interested in him again...
...movie has the curious vagueness of intent that makes so many "meaningful" works of fiction not all that meaningful. I'd be happy to accept Greenberg as a portrait of the terrible insecurities and needs that bring the lovely person and the stinker together. But I doubt that Baumbach intended to make a dramatized version of Smart Women, Foolish Choices. It seems out of character, and the tone is not that of a cautionary tale. I worry that he sees Greenberg as a modern, ennui-filled love story and believes, like Florence, that Greenberg can be saved by the love...