Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is a low key, intimate character study centering around Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller). Greenberg, as we quickly find out, was recently released from a mental health facility and is taking up to living in his brother’s house while he travels to Vietnam with his family. Greenberg soon sparks a relationship with his brother’s assistant Florence, and their relationship is pretty touch and go to say the least.
The relationship between Roger and Florence is actually quite palpable almost immediately. There is an awkward tension between them, but they’re both in the right frame of mind for a quick hook up it seems. Except while Roger wants to do nothing and be connected to no one, Florence seems to yearn for a constant connection with anyone and to fill her life doing task after task for Roger’s brother. Their lives overlap in a very unique and very true way.
Ben Stiller gives one of the finest performances of his career. It’s nothing like he’s done before, and is very subdued. Stiller’s main asset is great timing, and Greenberg himself has a good deal of fantastic lines. He’s a very moody guy who seems to focus on the minutia of life, and almost everything seems to bother him. It’s a very, very realistic character. He’s narcissistic and always in his own head. He rarely lets things go. But there is an air of humanity embedded in him that makes him a sympathetic character. He’s not tremendously “likable,” if that were a legitimate argument for disliking the film as whole, but he’s human. He’s obviously sorting through things in his life, and trying to embrace a new Roger Greenberg.
“Are you watching closely?”
