Greenberg

I must first admit that I kind of was going into this movie completely blind folded to the fact of the real plot. I figured it was going to be about a man who was on a journey of self discovery. Oh how I was wrong! It is not a movie about a man trying to find himself, because that would imply that there was actually a developing plot.

Greenberg,starring Ben Stiller as Roger Greenberg and amazing newcomer Greta Gerwig as Florence Marr, was written and directed by Noah Baumbach. This was the same man who brought us "The Squid and the Whale", a movie that not many saw but everyone should have. This time around Baumbach presents a story about a man named Roger Greenberg who decides, after being recently released from an mental institute in New York, to go and house-sit for his brother Phil Greenberg, played by Chris Messina. During this time Greenberg decides that he is going to take a break from life and just "do nothing". This manifestation of his attitude is completely reflected in the script of the movie, which provides no growth for almost the entire film. We follow Greenberg from boring socially removed experience to more of the same situations just with different scenery to look at.

But as the movie progresses, if you can call it that, we see a truly different type of romantic relationship begin to develop. Roger begins to loath his lonely isolated life and remedies it by having awkward sex followed by mean spirited conversations with his brother's personal assistant, Florence Marr. And that is the basic premise of the entire movie.

Of course there are some questions that need to be answered such as "will Greenberg finally figure out how to be happy outside of the asylum?" Or how about "will Greenberg finally be able to put some other persons needs before his own?" All of these questions, among many more, get answered by the end of the movie. But, by that point in time we don't care.

That is one of the major problems with this movie. You don't really care for the characters at all. They are all so self destructive that by the time the audience reaches the end, they really don't care for the characters, which in turn makes the ending seem less fulfilling.

Stick with "The Squid and the Whale".

2 out of 5