The Conundrum of ‘Greenberg’

I’ll be honest: I didn’t like Greenberg much – the character, not the movie.

The movie Greenberg stars Ben Stiller as an introverted, volatile, self-obsessed jerk. Its ad campaign promotes Greenberg as a kind of “lovable loser,” a 40 year-old ne’er-do-well with the affected charm of a teenage cynic – i.e., someone we can relate to. Yet it’s not a fair portrait, exactly. Greenberg is far less likable than you’d expect.

At the start of the movie, we learn that Greenberg’s troubles run deep: he’s just been discharged from a hospital, but “not that kind of hospital,” his sister-in-law warns; “he had a nervous breakdown.” She’s warning Florence Marr, the family’s nanny (played by Greta Gerwig). With the household in Thailand, Florence doesn’t have much to do. But she’s asked to check in on Greenberg, who’s crashing at his brother’s house, just to make sure he doesn’t need anything. Greenberg exhibits the classic symptom of co-dependency in LA: he doesn’t drive.

Florence approaches Greenberg with a forced nonchalance, fluttering around him and avoiding eye contact. She’s quintessentially West Coast. Terrified of confrontation, eager to appear cool, she waits for Greenberg to make a move. And despite his palpable anxiety, he does.

Stiller plays Greenberg brilliantly. (The script, by director Noah Baumbach, gives him plenty to work with.) Greenberg looks so uncomfortable in his own skin that half the time he could be wondering where to put his hands. And his awful, mangy hairstyle suggests a person entirely at odds with the material world. A neurotic character like Greenberg is prone to be overacted, yet Stiller and Baumbach give us something real: a man not defined by his neuroses but genuinely beset by them. In an early sequence, Stiller approaches a swimming pool with a haunted, brazen look. ‘Oh no,’ I thought – ‘is he gonna hurt himself?’ But Greenberg attacks the pool instead, desperate to overcome his inner wuss. In seconds we realize that Greenberg can’t swim. The pool wins.

Rather too quickly, Florence falls for Greenberg. She seems to want an easy life, but what she really wants is to make a complicated life easier. She finds a foil in Greenberg. With her eagerness to smooth everything over, she drifts through the ugly circumstances of their relationship like a college intern. She sighs a lot. (Her brief character setup is a passive one night stand, suggesting that Greenberg is an unfortunate love interest in a long line of many.)

Am I making this sound like a horrible movie? Because it’s not. Florence and Greenberg are not admirable people. I shudder at the thought of being either’s parent. Greenberg, when he’s not grouching about trivial wrongs, can be shockingly nasty. And Florence laps it up like a hungry, lazy dog. So why should anyone go see this movie? It’s a tough question. The film, like the relationship, is not a pleasant experience. But to answer this question – Why watch this? – is to answer something else as well. Why put up with anyone?

I am not at all a masochistic moviegoer. More than most, I loathe directors who take advantage of an audience. But in Greenberg, Baumbach expertly toes the line. He fashions a character that is just shy of insufferable. Any more annoying, and we’d wind up hating the experience. Any more sweet, and Greenberg would become a stock character: the down-on-his-luck dude who finds redemption in love (yawn). In testing my limits as a moviegoer, Baumbach had me thinking about my limits as a friend. How much patience did I have for Greenberg? Would I have had more or less if he were a real person? Would I have considered someone like him at all?

This is the fundamental conundrum of mental illness. Often, if not all the time, mental illness is defined by how much it aggravates us. The more frustrating a condition for us, the more severe we judge it to be. So if we’re committed to helping the mentally anguished, what limits can we rightfully have? If a family member or friend has become intolerable, isn’t that more evidence of need? How do we balance our own lives and those of more turbulence? The answer to “Why put up with anyone?” brings us back to the Golden Rule. We put up with exasperating people because we know how easily we can become exasperating ourselves.

So is Greenberg mentally ill? Absolutely. Some may disagree, likely because Greenberg seems too “normal.” But that’s exactly the point. Psychiatric disorder in cinema tends toward the extreme: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, A Beautiful Mind, The Aviator. Yet Greenberg presents the most vivid, honest portrait of illness I’ve ever seen on the big screen. Here’s a guy desperately trying to cope with the smallest niceties in life – and failing. When his best friend surprises him with a birthday cake in a restaurant, he storms out before yelling, “Sit on my dick!” The outbursts are painful to watch; they’re far from endearing. But you feel for the guy. Greenberg is a reminder of just how tough life can be.