It didn't take long for 2010 to yield its first great film: ""Greenberg,"" the sixth feature by writer/director Noah Baumbach, is an awesome achievement on many levels. The movie isn't a must-see due to its prickly tenderness or its stealthy hilariousness; rather, it would work in even without those commendable qualities.
""Greenberg"" marks a significant step in Baumbach's development as an artist and in the history of a cinematic tradition whose central figure is the absolute schmuck. If viewers find Ben Stiller's Roger Greenberg to be an insufferable jerk, it's because the character manages to tiptoe over the line of civility ever so slightly, just enough to make himself maddening, pathetic and thoroughly relatable.
Greenberg-types have always been crucial fixtures in Baumbach's oeuvre. Let there be no doubt that ""oeuvre"" is truly the best word to use when discussing his filmography: Now 40 years old, Baumbach has created four films—""Kicking and Screaming"" (1995), ""The Squid and the Whale"" (2005), ""Margot at the Wedding"" (2007) and now ""Greenberg""—that play off of and build upon each other wonderfully. If there is indeed such a thing as an auteur, surely Baumbach is one. He's the contemporary bard of the overly cultured misanthrope, the walking wounded with a sense of bourgeois entitlement. ""It'd be utterly unbearable if it weren't so honest"" could be said of practically all his work to date.
His characters resemble Woody Allen's unemployed aesthetes and New Yorker contributors if they suddenly went off their meds and cut ties with their shrinks. Theirs is a rage so repressed by literary aspirations and Xanax prescriptions that every gesture they make suggests self-absorption and self-loathing. ""Greenberg""'s self-consciously trite slogan, ""hurt people hurt people,"" is barely the tip of the iceberg.
Everybody knows or has known folks who'd fit right in with personas like Jeff Daniels' irredeemable teacher from ""Squid"" or Jennifer Jason Leigh's happy-go-lucky fuck-up from ""Margot."" Baumbach's films might not be universal in their appeal, but for the crowd to whom they speak, they're terrific therapy. Nowhere else in American cinema does one find such a satisfying combination of acidic comedy and authentic catharsis. The concluding scene of ""Greenberg"" could transform even the bitterest cynic into a sentimental softy, if only for a single humanizing instant.
""Greenberg"" is also Baumbach's most visually striking effort, which is curious given how the pictorial dimensions of works like ""Squid"" and ""Margot"" have commonly been ignored by critics in favor of the stories those films tell. But nothing in those films comes close to the beauty of the morning-after portrait of Greta Gerwig's Florence Marr—silently sitting bedside after a random hook-up, naked and struggling to think of something, anything—or the loving close-ups of her face in profile as she negotiates suburban L.A. traffic. Florence wavers between being an open book and a blonde question mark, flip-flopping between psychological accessibility and total withdrawal. The gratingly insecure Greenberg begs to be analyzed by others, but Florence often slides comfortably into the position of the infinitely unreadable Other.
Many have singled out Gerwig's performance as the highlight of ""Greenberg,"" but her function as a piece in the movie's many remarkable compositions is as compelling as her contributions to its countless cringe-and-grin-inducing sequences. Far from just being uncomfortable, her sex scenes with Roger are a picture of carnal honesty: to find them awkward is to find reality awkward as well. Unlike Nicole Kidman's eponymous bitch in ""Margot"" or Laura Linney's well-meaning mother in ""Squid,"" Florence seems incapable of thinking of anyhing nasty to say; she manifests a youthful saintliness that's greatly enhanced by ""Greenberg""'s gorgeous images.
If anything, these images recall the loving gaze present in the later work of Philippe Garrel. Indeed, Baumbach's films more closely resemble the work of French masters like Garrel, Maurice Pialat (in his unwillingness to ignore the existence of empathetic assholes) and Jean Eustache (whose 1973 scream-into-a-pillow ""The Mother and the Whore"" is a key point of reference in ""Squid"") than of meshugganah maestros like Allen or Larry David. To call this an intriguing cocktail of influences and affinities would be an understatement.
Baumbach's films aren't designed to reconcile the quirks and contradictions they illustrate, which, as with the aforementioned Wood-man, is perhaps his greatest strength as a filmmaker. Whether he's an underground man or an ivory tower intellectual is beside the point: he has consistently hit the mark, and it's a damn hard mark to hit.
