Greenberg (***1/4)

A moody, self-absorbed, depressive is one way to describe Ben Stiller’s character in Noah Baumbach’s third feature as writer-director. Slacker doesn’t quite work because he’s a little too intense. He spends his days doing things like writing complaint letters to airlines. A New Yorker (like all of Baumbach’s characters, so far), he’s in Los Angeles housesitting for his brother, meeting up with old friends, taking care of the family dog, and starting a haphazard relationship with his brother’s assistant/errand girl (Greta Gerwig).

Stiller is best known for playing slightly hapless but likable regular-guy types in comedies such as There’s Something About Mary or Meet the Parents. Less often he plays egomaniacal types who are simultaneously heroes and objects of ridicule, as in comedies such as Zoolander or Tropic Thunder. But he has occasionally played more three-dimensional roles—a junkie in the non-comedy Permanent Midnight, a rabbi in the existential rom-com Keeping the Faith, and an aimless narcissist only intermittently comedic effort.






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viewed 5/13/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 6/6/10

The Squid and the Whale (****)

This is a brilliant little slice-of-time movie, set in 1986 Brooklyn, about a family dealing with divorce. (It’s autobiographical on the part of writer-director Noah Baumbach.) It’s a melancholy and emotional, but not maudlin, film, aided by a nice quiet soundtrack. The parents are Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney. Linney’s very good, but Daniels’s is the pivotal character, a self-important literature professor and unsuccessful novelist who fortifies his ego by being fiercely competitive. The couple’s college-age son reacts by adopting his father’s opinions as his own, while the younger one recoils.

This isn’t a comedy, but it’s almost funny how much the professor’s image of himself is divorced from reality. Daniels is quite brilliant in his portrayal of the almost hilariously narcissistic father, and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline make strong impressions as the sons, too. Even without having to read it, it’s almost impossible not to assume that the father is based on a real person, such is the level of detail in the character. You’re embarrassed for the son as he parrots his fathers opinions, such as that This Side of Paradise is “lesser Fitzgerald,” though he inconveniently hasn’t read it.Baumbach doesn’t take his characters through too many changes, mostly just the older son becoming a little wiser. (There’s no needless flash forward to 2005, either.) He offers only distinctive personalities and efficient storytelling.

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circulated via email 11/10/05 and revised/posted 10/9/13