Hooray. Another Noah Baumbach Film

Spring has come and Noah Baumbach has decided it is time to grace us with a new movie to correspond with the thawing of winter. Greenberg, is another in a slew of suspended animation- adult/child movies that have made Judd Apatow into an “auteur.” The difference between Mr. Apatow and Mr. Baumbach is that Apatow makes the movies with heart and genuine enthusiasm that seem to jump out of the screen. Meanwhile, Mr. Baumbach has been at work in what I am sure is a Greenwich Village apartment, slaving away at what he has deemed as an intellectually important film.
Mr. Baumbach has made five movies in his career, the progeny of two critics; he has poked, prodded, and strived to make “intellectual” independent movies. Instead, he has made movies that amount to nothing more than fluff, full of dialogue and stories that would be found in any college screenwriting course, featuring the always sophomoric topics of family dysfunction, suicide, and sexual dysfunction.
While he made a few movies under the radar during the early 1990’s, he came to prominence with The Squid and the Whale (2005), a loosely autobiographical film about a divorce. He followed this with another tale of family dysfunction with Margot at the Wedding (2007). These two movies were largely met with great reviews, a fact that mystifies me to this day. Both movies press the audience’s buttons and take the viewer to uncomfortable places, especially as they deal with the relationships of the characters. However, they offer no solution, ask no real questions, they just display each character as they go through relatively banal situations in upper-crust bohemia.
Baumbach strives to replicate the strained marriages of Bergman movies, while lacking the depth of soul to replicate the great director’s work. Making references to esoteric movies like The Mother and the Whore, or making snide jokes about masturbation does not constitute intellectualism nor does it constitute an intriguing or challenging movie. Doing the movie in the style of cinema-verite, only further turns the movies into some kind of hodge-podge of Cassavetes’ stories, while lacking the immediacy that his movies presented. Yet, people are charmed by these movies, critics regularly laud them, seduced by his snarky remarks and unlikeable characters.
All we can hope for now is that Baumbach will give us another work in collaboration with one of his regulars, Wes Anderson. Anderson, another critical darling, used to be an interesting filmmaker. He made movies like Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), all of which Anderson co-wrote with Owen Wilson. All of these movies managed to have a moral center, wonderfully comic moments, and good performances, while also asking interesting questions and presenting interesting answers to them. His matter of fact, almost un-emotional and detached style of having dialogue delivered by the actors worked. It was interesting, new, and still managed to bring the audience into the sphere of the movie.
Strangely, or not so strangely, when Anderson stopped writing with Wilson, and joined forces with Baumbach for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) the movies took a turn for the worse. All of a sudden the movies lost their style, their zip, and their panache. The characters that the audience formerly were able to identify with, empathize with, and enjoy for the duration of the movie were gone. Instead, a smarmy new form inhabited the screen, one without interest, without likable characters, without any sort of intellectual merit; they became flat boring stories about “exotic” places that lacked any kind of soul. This trend, while most heinously committed by The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, continued with their next collaboration, The Darjeeling Limited- another flat piece about brothers trying to find themselves in exotic India. This had a companion piece that was accessible from the Internet, a short film featuring Natalie Portman, that was almost unwatchable, entitled Hotel Chevalier. The short movie is about boring people living in the lap of luxury in Paris, who sit in bed discussing their relationship for fifteen minutes without any emotion. The conclusion is just as enthralling as the opening. For those that missed it, kudos to you.
The latest, a stop-motion adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, is just as bad as the others. The only thing that saves the movie is the stop-motion animation done by the same team that created Wallace and Gromit’s movies. If it were not for the animation of the movie, it would have been just as vapid and flat as any other creation by Anderson & Baumbach.
Noah Baumbach has decided to grace us with his presence and present another morally bereft, vapid, and insidious piece of filmmaking that should be relegated to college short film classes. The hole that John Cassavettes and Ingmar Bergman left for intellectually strident movies about troubled relationships has yet to be filled, no matter how entitled Mr. Baumbach seems to feel to attain that role.