To really pull off “Greenberg” would require a lead performance from a master actor. The actor it stars is . . . Ben Stiller.
Greenberg — neurotic, combative, narcissistic but centrally and overwhelmingly a bore — is a failed musician about to turn 41 who drifts into housesitting for his well-off brother in LA.
For reasons that are clear perhaps only to writer-director Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”), he attracts the lovely personal assistant who runs errands for his brother. The assistant, Florence, is played by Greta Gerwig in a performance of touching openness and vulnerability. She’s everything Greenberg isn’t — sexy, adorable, intriguing — and Baumbach should have thrown out the Stiller scenes and started over with her.
It’s odd that Baumbach, an astute director who got wonderful performances out of Jeff Daniels, Nicole Kidman and others, would think that in his 40s Stiller would suddenly deliver a first-rate dramatic performance. He was the weak link in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” bratty in “Permanent Midnight.”
Baumbach isn’t one to give in to cliché, but Greenberg (who has just emerged from a mental institution and whose lack of success includes failure at suicide) reeks of a type: the cocky creep who’s convinced he’s a genius and who renders women helpless with a glance.
Yet it’s very hard to believe this antisocial nobody — a guy who appears to get haircuts on an annual basis, has no job and can’t sustain a conversation on any topic but himself — could even score one date with someone as endearing as Florence. Greenberg doesn’t have to be likable for “Greenberg” to work, but if your film is a character study and the main character is tiresome, you’ve got a problem.
“I’m impressed by you,” Florence tells him. “You seem really fine doing nothing.” Yes, quite an accomplishment.
I still enjoyed “Greenberg,” to a point. Baumbach is one of the finest writers of arch dialogue working today. (Worse than youth being wasted on the young is that “life is wasted on . . . people.”) I like the odd angles of the movie, the confusion and droll awkwardness, and I like Baumbach’s restlessness.
After channeling Francois Truffaut (“Mr. Jealousy”) and Eric Rohmer (“Margot at the Wedding”), this time Baumbach seems to be trying for a mélange of his occasional collaborator Wes Anderson’s wry detachment and Robert Altman’s flowing cacophony. I expect to watch “Greenberg” again to see how it breathes and unfurls.
Yet Stiller doesn’t register internal anguish so much as peevishness (even when he makes out a grocery list that contains, in its entirety, whiskey and ice cream sandwiches). Greenberg’s aggressively ironic ’80s Steve Winwood T-shirt and his insistence that he and his buddy call each other “man” as an ongoing parody of people who call each other “man” make him as annoying as hipsters who shape their personalities around an empty space — what they are not. Just because something’s hard to find doesn’t mean it’s actually worth looking for.