Greenberg

Noah Baumbach’s latest is a confession of assholedom.  He’s always specialized in difficult people, and sometimes had the winning actors to make them seem passably sympathetic (Laura Linney and Jesse Eisenberg come to mind).  Here Ben Stiller’s anxious, beset persona works for the title character, and wrings some bitter humor out of his self-obsessed rants, but earns a bare minimum of sympathy.  His emotional victim and potential savior is Greta Gerwig, who has it in her contract, I surmise, that she has to expose her breasts within the first five minutes of any film she’s in, and repeatedly thereafter – with some, this passes for openness and vulnerability.  I can see how there are those who are smitten with her, but I find her charms easy to resist, though I register the infatuation of others.  Maybe it’s a generational thing, as Greenberg himself opines.  There’s definitely some wit and craft in these proceedings -- with good support from Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a nice German Shepherd – but its spirit is bleak at best.  A romantic comedy, even one as acerbic and wised-up as this, depends on the appeal of its leads, and here they are equivocal at best.  The transplanted New Yorker view of everyday life in real LA locations is another supposed appeal, but did not ingratiate me in particular.  I did not loathe Greenberg, as many are bound to do, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it either, as many critics have done.  (2010, MC-76)