dir: Noah Baumbach
2010
Officially the most depressing flick of the year. Worse than a twenty-hour Holocaust documentary. Worse than a dramatic indie flick chronicling the breakdown of a marriage in excruciating detail. Worse than a live action film where the main character is a computer animated dog.
It always gets me when the people designing the posters for films do this, whereupon they put the name of the ‘star’ at the top linking it directly to the main character of the flick they’re obviously in. When they were making those Bourne Identity et al flicks, the posters, which featured a big muscly pic of Matt Damon, often came standard with the phrase “Matt Damon IS Jason Bourne!” as if there were any lingering doubts in the confused populace.
Of course the confusion arises because Matt Damon isn’t Jason Bourne, a fictional character, he’s the actor and soft drink salesman Matt Damon, surprisingly enough.
So when the posters for this dirge of a flick has the same type of phrase, as in “Ben Stiller IS Greenberg”, I don’t have the same pedantic reaction. What I actually think in this instance is that if Ben Stiller actually was this Greenberg person, someone should murder him in his sleep.
Greenberg, as in the sort-of main character in this flick, is like the worst person I’ve ever seen in a movie. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter comes across as more pleasant and avuncular. The various versions of Hitler on film come across as less repellent and self-absorbed. Richard Milhous Nixon in the Oliver Stone flick screaming obscenities about Kennedy, blacks and Jews is nicer and cuddlier than this monster Greenberg.
The flick’s other main lead is a woman called Florence (Greta Gerwig), who seems to drop her kit at the drop of a hat. She is meant to come across as some kind of nice and sweet counterbalance to Greenberg’s almost autistic lack of regard for others, but she ends up being just as annoying, though not as unpleasant. She works as a personal assistant to a very wealthy Los Angeles-type, being Greenberg’s brother. I don’t mean personal assistant the way that the term applies to the rest of the world, as in, a person who used to be called a secretary or a go-fer, or a Girl Friday in the office, but in the L.A. contemporary version.
Which is, a person you hire and pay to do the things in organising your life that you don’t have time to do yourself, like walk your dog or pick up your dry cleaning or to do your shopping, and presumably to wipe the parts of your and your family’s anatomies that you don’t have time to wipe because of the freneticness of your lifestyle.
Rich people, eh? They suffer so we don’t have to.