Greenberg

Director Noah Baumbach

Baumbach with co-writer, spouse, and actress Jennifer Jason Leigh

GREENBERG                       B                    

USA  (107 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d: Noah Baumbach

Ivan: Youth is wasted on the young.

Greenberg:  I’d go further.  I’d go, ‘life is wasted on people.’

From the opening pan of Los Angeles covered in a blanket of smog, we know we’re in for something ugly, something oppressive, a world full of obnoxious people that’s likely to make us want to bolt for anyplace else on earth.  That’s pretty much the feeling of this movie, only we’re stuck inside the mind and body of an aggressively self-centered and painfully obnoxious Ben Stiller for two hours, which is a horribly uncomfortable place to be, as it must be for him as well, as we learn he was just released from an East coast psychiatric hospital.  Another smart and brilliantly written sketch of life from Baumbach, whose films are always among the best edited in the business, that’s not so much a story as an observance of the kinds of cruelties humans inflict upon one another.  A dour and unfunny Stiller really pulls this occasionally funny and otherwise incisive satire on the aimlessness of the middle class down, as he’s as unlikable a lead as you’re going to find, where his uncomfortableness with himself makes us feel equally squirmy, but in an unusual twist, we’re initially introduced to the family of his brother just as they are about to leave for a 6-week vacation in Vietnam.  Overly demonstrative, barking out orders and instructions for their “personal assistant” Florence, the always spacey Greta Gerwig, we’re immediately getting our fill of the rich and self-demanding.  After they leave, Stiller arrives, seemingly in a mental fog, a guy that appears to have plenty of issues to sort out, most of them within himself, yet he finds time to rattle off complaint letters to various corporations that he feels have forgotten the personal touch.  Stiller rambles about like a rat in a cage, a guy from New York who no longer drives, so is dependent on everyone else to take him wherever he needs, which falls upon Florence, who initially thinks he’s on a different wavelength than the rest of her friends, thinking that is somehow good, even as he treats her like the hired help.  Nonetheless, he gets in her pants just about from the moment he sees her, which seems to catch her off guard, discovering she may actually like the guy. 

The film falls into the miserablist camp, as the overly judgmental Stiller is filled with self-loathing, but tends to take out his frustrations on others, occasionally freaking out in random moments of anger which feel more like panic attacks.  He’s a guy that’s trying to be someone other than who he is, but who’s still trapped by the idea that somehow he’s better than everyone else, even as he comes across as pretty pathetic.  He’s required to look after his brother’s palatial estate and take care of the dog, where both he and the dog require daily medication just to stabilize.  His single goal is to do nothing other than build a doghouse.  This film plays out much like a high school reunion twenty years later, as Stiller was part of a band just after college, which split up largely on his account, because he insisted on certain control issues that the record companies refused to budge on, so it was a deal breaker, one that left a sour taste in the mouths of the other band members.  Several have moved on, successfully, while others tend to linger in the resentments of the past, including his so-called best friend Ivan, Rhys Ifan, now sober, but living in a motel, separated from his wife and son, though still trying to work out a reconciliation.  Stiller continues to view him much as he did decades ago, as if time hadn’t changed either one, as if there are still unresolvable issues from their youth to work out instead of as a guy caught up in an ugly situation who might actually need a friend.  Stiller is incapable of being that friend or being that far sighted, as instead he continues to be completely self-absorbed with his own life and barely realizes others exist.  He treats Florence much the same way, attracted to her when he sees her, but is immediately revolted afterwards, as he can’t deal with closeness issues, so instead pushes everybody away with apparent disgust. 

Greta Gerwig, who comes across like a young Chloë Sevigny, is easily the best thing in the film, as none of the miserable people that live in Los Angeles deserve her, as she’s a breath of fresh air in a city drowning in smog, where her naturalism in a sea of great pretenders makes her the special attraction.  Perhaps the best scene in the film is in a near empty bar where Florence is singing Shawn Colvin’s “There’s a Rugged Road,” Greenberg - Greta Gerwig singing There's a Rugged Road (2:33), and is astoundingly good, yet Stiller is oblivious to her talent or sensuality, which is nearly forced upon him by one of her friends (Merritt Wever from Nurse Jackie) as she stops by the bar, yet he ignores all roads that lead to somewhere.  Instead he insists on his existential path of “doing nothing,” which apparently is a lot harder to do than he realizes.  While calling Florence to join him at dinner, he then leaves her at the table to call another old college flame (Jennifer Jason Leigh), now married with kids, to ask her out.  Later when they meet, he inappropriately tries to stir up old flames that she doused years ago and nearly flees from the scene.  As Jennifer Jason Leigh is a co-writer with her husband the director, expressing some of the caustic anger accumulated at the end of a marriage (she filed for divorce by the end of the year, with Baumbach starting an affair with Gerwig shortly afterwards), she likely contributed to some of these scenes where women have to put up with so much garbage from men, who typically try to dump all their emotional baggage onto women’s shoulders, as if this is the role of women, which of course men routinely do without realizing what asses they are for doing it.  All of this leads to a giant out of control party scene where Stiller takes every inappropriate drug on the premises, from coke to Vicadin to alcohol to pot to some unnamed pills somebody puts in your hands before insisting they listen to Duran Duran, telling these twenty somethings why he finds them all such spoiled, miserable wretches who have done nothing to change the world, a performance earning him the nickname Mr. Sunshine since he is really such a complete grouch.  Nearly leaving it all for Australia the following morning, idealized as a great Kinks song, The Kinks - Australia (6:42), this must be the exact wish fulfillment fantasy every Los Angeles resident must feel when they wake up to yet another smog-filled day, as Stiller, by the way, never does get around to finishing that doghouse, as he’s too busy living in it himself.          

First Reformed

FIRST REFORMED              C+                                          

USA  (113 mi)  2017 d:  Paul Schrader

Loneliness has followed me my whole life — everywhere — in bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores — everywhere.  There’s no escape.  I’m God’s lonely man.

—Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976), written by Paul Schrader

A crisis in faith film, made for people who feel suffocated by an overly repressive church, who prefer, like writer/director Paul Schrader, a tortuous existence, with suffering a stand-in for religious commitment, as if it could wipe away the sins of the world.  Associated with Scorsese as a screenwriter in films like Taxi Driver (1976), RAGING BULL (1980), and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988), Schrader grew up attending the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, never seeing a film until he was in his late teens, early on training to become a minister, where it is significant that roughly three out of 10 Protestant leaders describe their church as “Calvinist or Reformed,” a proportion statistically unchanged from a decade earlier (according to a 2010 Barna poll, So there is no NeoReformed/New Calvinist movement - Patheos).  The Christian Reformed Church is the American embodiment of the original 16th century reformation movement that became necessary as the Catholic Church spawned corruption and failed to respond to its parishioners, examples being widespread corruption among the Catholic clergy, especially at the top, the practice of torturing people suspected of holding non-orthodox beliefs until they confessed or died, encouraging parishioners to pray to Mary and to the saints (instead of Jesus Christ), also church sales pitches, including fake letters from the Pope, that promised heavenly redemption once money was received.  While popular in the Netherlands and Germany, later an American version arose, becoming the Christian Reformed Church (currently 300,000 members in the United States and Canada).  While narratively modeled after Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951) and Bergman’s WINTER LIGHT (1963), the film lacks the sparseness and transcendent poetry, bearing more of a resemblance to Bruno Dumont’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #5 Hadewijch, as it tries to be a modern parable, complete with contemporary themes, but all in all, it’s overly fatalistic, bearing a gloominess that resembles the tortuous anguish of Scorcese’s Silence (2016).  Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Toller, a pastor with a dwindling congregation at an old Protestant New England parish that’s been around since 1767, part of the Underground Railway, whose historical significance is diminished by being a subsidiary of a much larger modern megachurch.  Leading a solitary existence, giving little thought to his own health or well-being, the film is a morose tale of a despondent priest who grapples with his own existential malaise, himself a former military chaplain, having lost a son in the Iraq War that destroyed his marriage, his road to redemption lies in service to others by practicing his faith, though he’s constantly challenged at every turn, recorded in his yearlong diary, where his bleak inner narration provides the outline of the story, basically a reflection of God’s silence expressed through acute self-loathing, describing an “all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of all things.”

One of the aspects of neo-Calvinism is a youthful trend of fiery rhetoric that seems rooted by the insular nature of college universities, like think tanks, which have a way of consolidating like-minded thinking, but remain isolated, protecting their inner core while combatting or even condemning outsiders.  This film seems dedicated to the idea of opening up the church to deeply rooted modern era problems that affect us all but seemingly have no answers, which includes ecological nightmare predictions as well as the influence of money in serving the church’s social mission, as the church is often connected to powerful technological interests that may be creating many of the toxic hazards that could diminish or deteriorate any future quality of life.  The church tends to reflect a status quo position, seemingly above the fray, yet may privately be partnering with some of the biggest offenders of toxic waste.  Reverend Toller gets involved in the life of a young married couple at the behest of an ardent believer, Mary (Amanda Seyfried, actually pregnant during the shoot), who is worried about the deteriorating mental state of her non-believing husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an avowed radical environmentalist who has been arrested, preventing him from continuing to help the cause, losing his faith in the apathy surrounding global consciousness, as there’s little interest in saving the planet, creating nightmare scenarios that he’s all too familiar with, struggling with the notion of losing all hope.  While Reverend Toller makes a genuine attempt to counsel a lost soul, laying the foundation of the internal struggle, “Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind at the same time: hope and despair,” suggesting despair exists so that God’s hope is that much more meaningful, where overcoming doubt is the real struggle, yet he is himself facing a losing battle with his own inner torment, drinking heavily while eating sparingly, weakened by his own self-inflicted choices, yet carries on to face a new day with revived spiritual interest, as he identifies with Michael’s predicament, himself something of a black sheep among the flock of the devoted, where the parent church, run by Pastor Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer), couldn’t be more financially successful, viewed throughout the community as a pillar of society.  Exploring the darker regions of society may come naturally for Toller, as he has his own unique familiarity, yet he’s equally as troubled himself, even as he offers guidance and counsel. 

The scenes between Toller and Michael form the inner core of the pastor’s dilemma, with Michael asking, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?”  While this question reverberates and echoes throughout the rest of the film, their conversation is intriguing but pales in comparison with Steve McQueen’s HUNGER (2008), for instance, a thoroughly complex film that at its center becomes a twenty-minute uninterrupted dramatic scene contemplating the 1981 Irish hunger strike between prison inmate IRA activist Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest arguing the life and death moral implications.  That is a thoroughly riveting first rate drama, while here, perhaps the most surprising scene is a moment of stark cruelty that occurs out of nowhere (there were audible gasps in the audience) between a former husband and wife, with Toller demeaning and humiliating his ex-wife Esther (Victoria Hill) for expressing an interest in his well-being, egotistic actions that undermine all else, calling into question any other motivations he may have.  In other words, what good is it to find forgiveness with God if you can’t forgive your wife?  She’s a member of his flock that needs shepherding as well.  To utterly give up on her equates him with spewing toxic venom, a parallel with the oil and chemical manufacturers who think only of themselves and their own self-term interests and financial gain, all but ignoring the long-term needs of the planet.  The whole thing feels like a moralist trap, a test of absolutism, vying off to explore just a single branch on the tree of sin, yet becoming consumed by the ramifications, clouded by errant judgment, never really seeing the forest through the trees, arguably accepting martyrism as a way out (more short-term speculation), which in the full scope of things only diminishes the overall impact, leaving more to be done by future generations to clean up the mess you left behind.  While Toller’s plan of action remains initially ambiguous, where rational thought turns metaphysical and surreal, with doubts swirling around his head, moving from one possibility to another, with lingering afterthoughts, yet the final implications are clear, whiffing in his moment of truth, coming up empty, ultimately drowning in his own self-pity, lost in the vacuousness of an ethical collapse.  While it’s commendable taking a moral interest in difficult and all-encompassing social positions, similar to Father Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic priest who worked actively in the 60’s against the Vietnam War, putting him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list (eventually  serving two years in prison), the first priest to make the list, yet this film never rises to that level of plausibility, as few American priests ever put themselves on the line like that (unlike the many Baptist pastors in the Civil Rights movement), where the moral convictions would have to be more than mere speculation.  The idea of equating radical environmental activism with extreme religious conviction seems misguided, having more in common with martyrdom and Islamic jihadism along with other radical misadventures that when put into action would only destabilize a polarized public, where democracy requires convincing an otherwise disinterested public about the merits of your argument.  While this film portrays a wayward priest’s struggle with faith and moral servitude, the chosen path convinces no one, basically betraying his own calling, becoming instead an off-the-rails horror story, with the finale set to a raw and bare-bones rendition (sung by Esther) of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” chillingly recalled being sung by Robert Mitchum as the phony predator priest in The Night of the Hunter (1955).