#10 of 2010: Greenberg

Like The Fighter, another regionally specific, humor-spiked American character study that I wouldn't trade for anything, Greenberg shows a marvelous knack for shifting a plausibly bonded calico of characters onto and off the screen, gathering them together and separating them out. Rich, consistent rewards are generated from scenes where we observe group interaction from a sufficient distance to make our own choices of whom to watch and our own surmises about the relative distance between characters. These make for subtle, savory feasts of personality revealed through behavior, but the movie is equally adept at zeroing in on single characters or pairs and digging incisively into the particulars of what makes them tick or, more often, not tick. Even more than The Fighter, Greenberg stays fresh and surprising with its dramatic choreography: it's never clear who will linger within or disappear from Roger Greenberg's ornery orbit. Characters who seem like one-offs return for tangy comedy or tough confrontation; others thread themselves in and out as semi-regular mainstays; the female lead, around whom the film opens and with whom a central relationship begins to coalesce, goes missing for a significant passage, within an astutely engineered narrative context.

The ensemble plays as richly as in a Leigh or Demme film, without abandoning that prickliness and starch that Baumbach has been perfecting. Laugh lines ("You let a mental patient go down on you?") and quiet heartbreakers (Rhys Ifans, supplying the correct name of his son) are equally within the purview of Baumbach's deepest, nimblest, most surprising ensemble so far. Roger's aggressive unapproachability is funny, poignant, and intimidating, not unlike Mark Zuckerberg's in The Social Network, but more discomfiting and even infuriating, often to himself, without topical rhetoric or simplified arcs of romantic yearning to cushion the blow of such exacting portraiture. Compare Greenberg to Coppola's Somewhere, and you see how a story of L.A.-specific drift and disappointment doesn't need to hit the same nail quite so frequently, or so fully on the head; Savides's light proves evocative and elevating of the film without feeling so obviously recruited into blunt directorial framings and conceits. Compare Greenberg to Black Swan and note that a seemingly objective camera can perform a dissection of a highly aggravated mind without resorting to hysteria, or equating fearlessness with hyperbole. Am I making Greenberg seem special only by running down its peers, framing them as reflections of this film rather than autonomous entities? Apologies; Roger makes that reflex contagious. I skipped Greenberg in theaters because the ads didn't convince me I needed to attend; since debuting on DVD, it's remained a pebble I can't get out of my mental shoe, and don't want to. (capsule review)