Director: Noah Baumbach
A film like Greenberg should not even show in theaters. A theater is a terrible place to watch a film that is awkwardly funny, where there's no real punchlines, and where at most half the crowd will be laughing.
I've compared Baumbach to Woody Allen, and I think that's a perfectly cromulent comparison. However, one place Greenberg differs from the Allen films I've seen is that at no point does Greenberg purport to be a meta-film - our protagonist is not self-consciously telling us this story. Allen's neurotic hero, in spite of his neuroses, we root for - Ben Stiller's Greenberg leaves us much more ambivalent. As a result, I don't think a film like this can ever really be a great film, but Greenberg does just about as well as it can. It's not moving, but it's always interesting.
I didn't realize the first time just how good Ben Stiller's performance is. While I think it's not that hard to nail a role like this - there's only about three or four moods Stiller has to convey - he nails the movements and the gestures of the character.
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