Funny how a movie about a guy who wants to do nothing amounts to just that: nothing. Ben Stiller is a complete waste in the title role, a man currently living in a fuck-it-all philosophical funk, house sitting for his wealthy brother in his hot shit L.A. mansion. He kind of falls for his brother’s loyal but loopy personal assistant, annoying newcomer Greta Gerwig, and the two spend several weeks talking, fighting, quasi having sex, and talk fighting some more.A backstory I couldn’t care less about tells us that Greenberg and his old college mates almost had a record deal, before Greenberg bitched out and moved to New York to become a… carpenter (?). The movie grows more puzzling, and boring, with each passing minute. Even if we wanted to care about these characters, writer/director Noah Baumbach (who did great work on The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding) doesn’t give us a chance to.
If there is a point to Greenberg, it is unbeknownst to me. It’s on par with Judd Apatow’s Funny People; a talented director goes all free lance on us and makes something disastrously sentimental. Oh well. If you’re smart you’ll stay away. Watching Greenberg is not only pointless, but painful as well. D-
Note: apparently this was posted outside of a theatre...
This film was the ultimate example of a failure of nerve on behalf of it's makers and it's main star: a bitter existential rant against the encroaching younger generation of consumerist children who would pave the way for the rise of the Trump era, by an aging liberal Jewish intellectual artist who had come of age on the brink of Reaganism. It is a story that needed a titanic and complex performance, with constantly shifting moods, colors, and emotions: not in Mr. Stiller's wheelhouse. Not a pestilent schlump; a disco-era teenage idealist who has gone sad, bad, and mad as a broken middle-aged man who knows he no longer has a place in the world of smartphones, compromised and enervated friends and lovers, and a world that has nothing to offer except passionless conversation, computer porn, and texting: a contemporary 21st century THE FIRE WITHIN, redeemed only in part by a tentative love affair with a lost woman who cannot understand such overwhelming angst in a time where there is no longer any room for it. The film was deliberately destroyed by the very political powers it was meant to slay, and they got what they wanted: the sign says it all. I should know. The film makes a oblique reference to my work and my name, and I would of made sure it would of become something along those lines, if I had been given the chance to star in it.
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