Spaces in Between
The importance of being idle ─ Noah Baumbach's GREENBERG gets under your skin with its subtle and slightly uncomfortable tones.
GREENBERG
Roger walks and walks on the street, supermarket bags in tow. But home and food supplies aren’t the only kinds of baggage he carries: Dear American Airlines, Dear Mayor Bloomberg, Dear Starbucks, Dear Hollywood Pet Taxi Co. Roger likes writing letters – not to say hello, how are you, you’ve been great, but to point out what seems to be everyone’s little mistakes.
Urban middle-aged angst is the overarching theme of director Noah Baumbach’s latest film GREENBERG (USA), running in the Berlinale Competition. Roger Greenberg (played by Ben Stiller) moves to New York to work as a carpenter, after failing to make it in the music industry in Los Angeles. Now, 40 and pale, he’s returned to house-sit his brother’s Hollywood home and to reconnect with his best friend and ex-girlfriend. As it dawns on him that they’ve drifted apart, he spends his days doing absolutely nothing. Well, not nothing: He loiters around the house, walks the dog, constructs a dog house, reads the paper, watches his neighbours, and swims – even if he doesn’t know how.
“You seem fine doing nothing”, Florence (actress Greta Gerwig), his brother’s personal assistant, tells him. “I’m doing nothing deliberately”, he replies. “There’s so much crap out there.” During their first meeting, Roger turns his iPod on and plays “It Never Rains in Southern California” by English musician Albert Hammond. The song is about a singer who moves to L.A., fails to pursue a career in Hollywood, and deteriorates in the process.
As in Baumbach’s earlier films THE SQUID AND THE WHALE and MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, a combination of dark and natural lighting is employed to aid audiences to look closer: The film’s brilliance can be found in the spaces in between, granting us a deeper glimpse on the characters – we feel we know them, yet they are strangely alienated from us.
In one of the many memorable conversations between the two leads, Roger references the movie WALL STREET, particularly the scene where Charlie Sheen’s character looks out at Manhattan from his balcony and utters, “Who am I?” – exactly what audiences will ponder on after watching. GREENBERG is an absorbing, at times hilarious, and almost meditative piece on solitude and crisis. It is a testament to its filmmaker’s skill of coming face-to-face with the most existential of topics using simple, quiet stories.
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