Maybe I wasn’t being fair to the movie when I finally saw it yesterday. I didn’t want to see it, was almost afraid of seeing it. And I hated it.
I’ve put in a lot of time thinking about Greenberg-type characters — from Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day to self-declared failure Nicolas Slonimsky to Seymour Krim — and I’ve got a dose of the syndrome Greenberg is supposed to have, and which the others named above do have, which is a love of an ideal that makes ordinary life seem insipid.
And that’s where Baumbach got it all wrong.
He said on Charlie Rose that he was partly inspired by Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who writes unsent letters to various people in his private life and world history. Through the letters, Herzog unstuffs his mind of the half-understood ideas his education has left him. And through the letters Herzog also reveals himself to himself, writing letters even to God, in whom he still believes. And the letters inform him and us that there is still some good in Herzog.
But Greenberg writes letters to Starbucks and the Pet-Taxi company. His letters reveal his meanness. He has no longing for something better, no fineness of feeling or taste or ability to love or create. There is no evidence of his earlier love of music. Where is that? (Playing “Duran Duran” because it is “good coke music” doesn’t count.) That doesn’t just die. That’s what the movie does not understand. Deeply rooted yearnings always find a way to express themselves.
Greenberg lacks the yearnings for something finer but nevertheless finds the world insufferable.
That’s not interesting. Especially when the filmmaker doesn’t realize that’s what he’d doing.
Baumbach offers a completely condescending view of people who don’t lead lives in the arts. If you are not a working musician then you live in a mental desert. In Greenberg, people don’t discuss books, write songs, write articles, talk about movies, play music. They just mentally wither.
That’s not what happens. Something much more interesting happens. They continue reading and talking and thinking and writing and playing. And they sometimes become admirable people.
p.s. The laziest thing about Greenberg is how it pirates interest by tapping into Jewish American archetypes, which it turns into stereotypes. Greenberg is a triumph of Jewish marketing savvy over Jewish creative powers. Without Baumbach and Stiller pushing it, it would have died the death it deserved. I guess there are still some people who think that anything Jewish is smart and cool. Greenberg should end that.
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