Life Is Wasted On... People.

So, there were a couple of laugh-out-loud moments in Greenberg, and that line was one of them. The whole delivery of it. "'Life is wasted on the living.' 'I'd go further. I'd say, life is wasted on... people.'" Hilarious. Pity that for the most part, though, the film was just kind of tedious.

Ben Stiller takes the lead role of Roger Greenberg, a 40 year old carpenter who has just returned to Los Angeles to housesit his brother's house while he is on an extended holiday with his family. Roger has also just suffered a nervous breakdown. His brother tells Roger that he can use their personal assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig), and, after a rocky start, the two enter into a sexual relationship. At the same time, Roger is reconnecting with his old life in LA. He meets up with an old bandmate Ivan (Rhys Ifans), the only one who really talks to him now after Roger scotched a record deal fifteen years earlier that lead to the demise of the band, who in turn helps to reconnect him to other friends, including Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an ex-girlfriend that Roger also tries to hit it off with, only to be met with rejection.


Aaand, that's about it. Really. 


I can see what the aim was here. Casting Stiller was probably similar to the tried and tested casting of someone against type in a serious but slightly, wryly comic film (see The Truman Show, Man On The Moon and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind for examples of this succeeding with Jim Carrey...) and show off their acting chops whist dealing with a serious subject and breaking down audience perceptions of the reality of the ailment and of the abilities of the actors. I'm sure that was the aim. The problem was the script just didn't really have anything going for it. There is no hook there. The hook is presumably meant to be Roger, but he is almost entirely unlikeable - nothing makes you root for him, nothing makes you really care about his predicament. He's a knob. Sure, he's had a hard time recently and that might be making him more of a knob, but it also seems that he was a knob before, and he doesn't stop being a knob as the film goes on, which leads you to conclude that, yep, he's a knob and nothing's going to change. 


And then it doesn't seem quite like they finished writing it. There are points in there that feel perfectly scripted, but then points where it feels like they're running on impro, but they're not doing in particularly well. There's a scene involving Leigh and Stiller in a coffee shop where I really noticed it. Like, not having a script is fine and all, and improing all the way along can work really well, but you can't chop and change like that. If it's going to feel like you're making it up as you go along then make sure it is consistent and it can add to the film. But when an occasional scene here and there feels like that it is very, very distracting. And incredibly frustrating.


More than that, however, was the issue with the character arc, and the fact that our protagonist didn't seem to have one. Florence kind of did, she was a much more interesting and empathetic character beautifully played by Gerwig. Maybe if the film had focused on her it would have worked, but she was secondary and her vastly superior story was an also-ran.


Leigh co-created the story with director Noah Baumbach, as well as serving as producer. The film felt very Baumbach, but I'm sure some of the blame must sadly be laid at the feet of Leigh, which is sad because I quite like her. And for the most part, out of the just-off impro segment, I liked her performance in Greenberg. And I think the idea had merit. But then... no. 2 stars.

I Know How To Do It Now.

Oh, my love affair with Charlie Kaufman has been long and pleasurable. Not nearly long enough, actually, but pleasurable, where further pleasure could only be derived from further watchings of his existing films or by the release of new ones. Starting with Being John Malkovich, moving through Adaptation and ending up at Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (which I swear gets better and better, closer and closer to perfection every time I see it) (and I know I'm skipping Human Nature here - I've never seen it, one day I will, but from what I've heard it's not his best by far.) 

Which of course leads to his directorial debut, last year's Synecdoche, New York. The story revolves around theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), married to artist Adele (Catherine Keener) with one young daughter. Living in Schenectady, he has just directed a version of Death Of A Salesman to rapturous acclaim. Adele, meanwhile, who has an exhibition opening shortly in Berlin, announces that she thinks it will do their marriage good if she goes to Berlin alone with daughter Olive, leaving Caden alone to flirt with Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works the box office at his theatre. Time passes and Caden hears nothing from Adele, and it becomes apparent that she has left him, finding incredible fame in Europe. Caden receives a fellowship grant, and with it decides to stage something big and important. This masterwork is his synecdoche.


Caden creates a miniature New York City within a warehouse in New York City. Within it he has an enormous cast of actors, working in the space simultaneously on their own stories, a piece of installation art on a mammoth scale, all directed by him. Years of rehearsals pass and the warehouse gets bigger and bigger, completely isolated from the real world outside. Cast members come and keep coming, Caden casts someone to play himself, and indeed replaces himself with someone else. He tries to find his wife and daughter and repeatedly fails, throwing himself back into the project with incredible dedication, expanding it and making it more and more complex, more and more real. It gets to a point where his play is the real world, there is no world outside it, after twenty years of rehearsals, the rehearsals have become reality.


It is a monumental vision with an incredible cast. Emily Watson features. Dianne Wiest features. Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Kaufman, well recognised as being a master at creating places and times and stories entrenched in reality at the same time as they take an enormous leap away from it, takes the world and builds it within itself with Synecdoche, New York. And it is so real, even as it is so false.


But beyond the grand scale, it has been a long time since a film has elicited such a vocal response from me. I laughed out loud, I gasped, I stated my disbelief on more than one occasion. I was so swept up in the two hours of cinema that I was totally lost within it. The performances were astonishing across the board, Hoffman was mindbogglingly good, and I even thoroughly enjoyed Morton, whereas normally I'm quite content tolerating her. A beautiful theatrical score from Eternal Sunshine's Jon Brion highlighted the heightened emotional state, but it was Kaufman's script that kept on giving. Little random things, his trademark, dotted through a screenplay that, without them, would have been exceptional regardless, gave the characters a little more strange depth. Made them a little more individual within what otherwise could have been a homogenised and stale repetitive rehearsal process. I say could have been, meaning in the hands of a lesser writer.


And as a director, Kaufman acquits himself more than adequately. He pulls it all together, the obscene grandiosity of it all, while keeping it essentially very human. We stay within Caden even as the warehouse expands outwards. As incredible as it all is on the outside, it is the inside of his character that we cling to and emote with throughout.


5 stars.