FILMOGRAPHY
Kicking and Screaming (1995)
Mr. Jealousy (1997)
The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Greenberg (2010)
Frances Ha (2012)
While We’re Young (2014)
Mistress America (2015)
The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)
Marriage Story (2019)
White Noise (2022)
SUMMARY
There have been few filmmakers in the history of the cinema more effective in lending moviegoing the feeling of enervation than Noah Baumbach. Born in 1969 in Brooklyn, NY to a pair of film critics, Baumbach started his career at a tender age (25) mimicking the styles of Whit Stillman and Woody Allen, but with an even more acerbic sting that often lapsed into pure misanthropy. His work won participation from great talents, continued funding in the face of monumental bombs, plaudits from the critical establishment, but yet mostly justifiable consternation on the part of the moviegoing public. The films were joyless and derivative, misappropriations of ideas and devices from artists such as Philip Roth, Richard Yates, and Woody Allen. They mostly arrived dead on the screen, populated by people who were essentially exaggerated into deranged forms but given voices that affected a simulation of literacy, so that mocking them brought a kind of smug satisfaction elegantly camouflaged by artistic pretension. They seemed to say: “This is real life among those talented enough to understand.” They had a smugness, a hipness, a hermetic insularity that was probably a symptom of their place and time, but almost certainly a symptom of their maker. Baumbach was obsessed with literary irony, and, like his forebear, Whit Stillman, seemed to think that self-contradiction and hypocrisy were finest spices of comedy and drama.
Rather predictably, he emerged as that kind of critical darling that seems to walk between rain drops. I wouldn’t be so hostile, but in a young medium which for many held the promise of hitherto unseen aesthetic frontiers, Baumbach’s films were almost always a regression. Again, not so apparently worthy of hostility, except that they were a critically lauded and critically endorsed regression, which, with the coincidence of the advent of digital photography completely upending the cinematic experience, helped to cheapen and enervate both movies and moviegoing. A common refrain was to excuse Baumbach’s cynical regard for his own characters with yet another fiction: that of abuses as expressions of love. But characters– in the sense of identification and anything approaching empathy– were rarely to be found in his films. And if the films were entertainments, they said more, perhaps, about those who found them entertaining. They didn’t even manage– for all their similar modishness– to push the cinema into new realms of idiosyncratic aesthetic whimsy, like his contemporary and associate, Wes Anderson. There was little sense in getting into the car, driving to the theater, and paying some $15 to spend time with Baumbach’s characters. Even if one did, the experience was almost always less rewarding than the drive itself.
He began his career by evaporating investor money with the pointless Kicking and Screaming (1995). Even though it stood in stark contrast to films such as Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and even Kevin Smith’s Clerks, critics were gentle with the film, because Baumbach was quite young and it was bad in an inoffensive way.
Mr. Jealousy (1997), an artistic and commercial bomb, was an insufferably quirky comedy modeled off of Woody Allen and– wincingly– narrated by Baumbach himself so as to sound like a Francois Truffaut film.
Then came, after a considerable gap, three mid-career micro-aggressions relaying an almost malevolent regard for moviegoers:
The dreadful The Squid and the Whale (2005) was an embarrassment of riches– it grossed some 7 ½ times its budget, and secured for the filmmaker what he must have considered almost otherworldly critical reviews, along with a Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. This was a rich irony, given that the writing was only made remotely watchable through the strengths of Jeff Daniels, Jessie Eisenberg, and Laura Linney. More ironic yet was that Baumbach’s aesthetic “breakthrough” was a less humane reappropriation of Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” with whom Baumbach had written the screenplay “The Life Aquatic” only the prior year.
After the success of the film, Baumbach secured a sizable budget and Nicole Kidman for Margot at the Wedding (2007), an almost incomprehensibly smug movie only possible where hype and talent collide in disaster.
And then Baumbach joined Ben Stiller for Greenberg (2010). But more importantly, the film introduced Greta Gerwig into his work. It was another misanthropic dud, but not completely. Gerwig and Rhys Ifans brought an unusual warmth even though their material was meager and barely realized.
The ever-autocritical Baumbach divorced, and began a relationship with Gerwig, and suddenly, like a dawning sun, other feelings slipped into his work. Frances Ha (2012) was a modestly enjoyable lark about an aspiring young dancer who can’t seem to find her place in the world . It borrowed its often lovely energy from the French New Wave and Gerwig’s considerable talent. It featured some wonderful photography by Sam Levy and superlative editing by Jennifer Lame.
The messy, sometimes unfocused While We’re Young (2014) was as good, but with the same signature embitterment– though mercifully shoved into the later portion of the film. It was often suffused with the same brisk cinematic energy as Frances Ha, improvements aided again by Lame’s gifted editing and by the presence of Naomi Watts and Adam Driver.
Mistress America (2015), a mess, resurfaced much of the old miserabilism, especially Baumbach’s tendency (a tendency rife in the late 90s and 00s cinema, sadly) to first imagine hopeless, floundering, often bilious people and then humiliate them repeatedly for our artistic consideration. It also “borrowed” liberally from trends in literature that the cinema had already considered and digested decades before, and much more successfully.
Baumbach then took refuge from the box office at Netflix where The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) was a critically acclaimed exhibition of impressive vacuity thankfully relegated to tinier screens.
Marriage Story (2019), a less pretentiously camouflaged personal film that was Baumbach’s biggest popular success to date, was a reasonably well wrought drama about divorce. It featured some of the more combustive marital arguments put to film, made ever more explosive because of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson’s committed performances.
Baumbach then rendered Don Dellilo’s 1985 novel White Noise (2022) into a very different, very bad kind of film: that of the ‘presumed impossible literary adaptation suffused with an audacious cinematic imagination.’ The film was neither imaginative, nor audacious, except in ways to either belabor or miss the point.
With a twist of irony, he then co-wrote, with Gerwig, Barbie, one of the most whimsical and financially successful films of all time.
WORKS
In his debut, Kicking and Screaming (1995), Noah Baumbach directs a cast of relative unknowns and Gen-X mainstays (Parker Posey and Eric Stoltz) in a film borne from the doldrums of extraordinary privilege. It often channels Whit Stillman so brazenly that lines read by Stillman regular Chris Eigeman such as, “I wish we were just going off to war. I wish we were retiring after a life of hard labor,” sound almost plagiaristic. The story– what little there is– involves a group of graduates from a stuffy liberal arts college who would rather simply stay in school than get on with real life. Almost all of Baumbach’s films recall stronger films, and often those only just made. His debut is no exception. Aside from Stillman, and as its title indicates, much of the film’s “witty” badinage is like dry Linklater, just off of the brilliant Dazed and Confused. Its an unfortunate comparison. There’s another telling moment early in the film, where Baumbach himself poses the question: “What would you rather do, fuck a cow or lose your mother?” The joke is that everyone ends up a “cow fucker.” Even Kevin Smith, at 23, would have cut this line from Clerks. Much of the film was shot at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. There are shots of Eagle Rock backstreets that recall Reservoir Dogs. That film was also a debut. But Baumbach, unlike Tarantino, not only finished high school, but went to college, and very likely writes with his Vassar days in mind. His characters sit around and chat about pop culture and lament their fledgling love lives. There are women in the film, including the ever-brilliant Parker Posey, who blows everyone but Eigeman off the screen. Baumbach occasionally pretends to elevate their standing, but implicit in the material is condescension. They are considerably more accomplished, more charismatic, and more directed than the men, but yet the men’s belabored indecision is of paramount importance to the central drama of the film. To give up the ghost of the movie’s festering misogyny is a woman who basically molests the film’s strikingly uninteresting protagonist, Grover (Josh Hamilton), while calling him a ‘pussy’. Baumbach has the poor woman (Perrey Reeves) go gratuitously topless like he were directing some kind of pseudo-literate Meatballs. Grover’s father, played by Elliot Gould, appears in a scene where an offer to intern at The New Yorker Magazine is only tepidly appealing to the young man. So we turn back to this reluctance to grow up– which may very well be real and identifiable. But the picture is so inconsequential that considering such a dismissal of what would be a life-changing opportunity for 99.9% of American college graduates has a way of making you wonder what on earth this film is supposed to be about. That feeling culminates in a revue of dreadful over-writing, where, after Grover’s Annie Hall (this is Olivia D’Abo as “Jane”) goes off to Prague, he delivers a soliloquy about indecision and action, trying to convince the airline attendant to find him the last seat on a flight to Czechia. But he forgets he doesn’t have a passport and she tells him, “You can always go tomorrow.” Wonk-wonk, a metaphor for life. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Steven Bernstein)
Incinerating investor money, Mr. Jealousy (1997) is even worse. Eric Stoltz, who by portraying an empty character highlights in own essential lack of charisma, and why he seems to thrive only in bit-parts, is the titular jealous one, Lester Grimm. Lester is a “writer” in that Woody Allen manner where things like budgets and jobs and income aren’t necessary. With seemingly with not much else to do, he works daily to make a hash of his relationship with Ramona, played by Annabella Sciorra, by doing strange things only indie movie characters would ever do, such as adopting his friend’s identity in on-going group therapy to get close to her ex. When the friend joins to pose as him, a better writer may have discovered a stronger comedy. Baumbach buries the lede and never excavates it. He himself narrates on top of the film, in a droll, stultifying tone meant to relay an energy I could never fully comprehend aside from sounding like a Francois Truffaut film. That Ramona, a stunner, has had some sex in the past is Lester’s predominant hang-up. Aside from some nicely characterized idiosyncrasies, we never learn much else about her. Chris Eigeman plays that ex-boyfriend. Once again, his line-readings make him the best thing about a bad film. He is “Dashiell,” an apparently great young writer. A running thread is that Lester very slowly digests Dashiell’s newest volume of stories. The movie suggests there are only delicately unlocked subtleties to powerful work. The characters in this one, meanwhile, act preposterously, and for no obvious reason. As do their names: Grimm, Ramona Ray, Dr. Poke, Dashiell, Lucretia. Peter Bogdonavich, who could never act yet filmmakers seem in rapture of his very presence, plays said Dr. Poke. And so there is Bogdonavich, of The Last Picture Show, in a film that is flat enough visually and comedically that its necessity in being a picture show at all is puzzling. Why not a first run in some modest New York theater house, where it would cost considerably less than $2 million? Baumbach’s script fumbles about for 90 or so minutes and then he tries to end his story in that classically winsome way of much Allen, the scene of “matured reunion” that, in Annie Hall as an example, is poignant, but here is pointless. Lester and Ramona lock eyes at a wedding reception and Baumbach trucks seemingly several thousand extras to cross-wipe the frame, one by one and endlessly, as he cuts between them. Finally, a swipe cut reveals Lester as having walked up off camera, and he appears slasher-film-style in front of her. As he reaches for her hand, I check my watch. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Steven Bernstein)
Incredibly, Baumbach returns after 7+ years, with a budget of $1.5 million and somehow secures Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and Anna Paquin with a screenplay entitled The Squid and the Whale (2005). The performances are all extremely strong, though the film they collectively make is dreadful. It is purportedly autobiographical, shot on hand-held 16mm like a documentary. Certainly some crude details from Baumbach’s life seem to match up. Daniels plays Bernard Berkman, a failed novelist and narcissist of almost impossible dramatic configuration. Linney plays Joan Berkman, his wife, who is beginning to realize her own success as a writer and who, it is not gently insinuated, seems to truck through extra-marital affairs as though her children do not exist. Jesse Eisenberg plays Walt, their eldest son, whose repeated demonstrations of severe mental illness serve as the film’s primary commentary on malignant patriarchy. Owen Kline, a terrific child actor, plays the youngest, Frank, perhaps even more behaviorally unwell and certainly a child of abusers. It should be noted, though, that part of Baumbach’s “dramaturgy” operates to the exception of normal psychology. These are not people at all, but screenwriterly calibrations, and any actual nuanced view of human behavior is not to be found. Even whiffs of it are swiftly crushed. And I mean this even in the course of isolated scenes. This is some of the most self-conscious writing ever filmed. So, the fact that the 12 year-old Frank disseminates his semen on school property, regularly sports a beer, drinks himself into vomiting stupors, experiments with condoms, and scolds his father with “suck my dick, assman,” shouldn’t be read as symptoms of, say, child abuse. Because then the film would have no landing. They are not symptoms of “abuse” at all, but “comedic ironies.” This is the level on which the film operates. Baumbach’s characters are exaggerated into deranged forms but given voices and behaviors that affect some crude simulation of “savant idiosyncrasy”, so that mocking them brings both smug satisfaction and the sense that the material is “fully realized” or “commenting on” something. Pretentious is an inaccurate way to swear it off. Though the character’s themselves are pretentious– impossibly so– and bilious, and yet somehow dramatically and intellectually “bigger” than normal folk. But Baumbach’s writing isn’t pretentious at all– it’s completely phony. Let me give two examples: Where we first pick up with Walt alone, he’s practicing his guitar, strumming out a terrible rendition of Roger Waters’s “Hey You” from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. He later plays it for his parents, and claims he’s written it for his upcoming high school talent show. They listen attentively, and then applaud him. Bernard calls it, “very dense and interesting”. Joan implores him, “Make sure you practice a lot. Remember you’re going to be in front of a lot of people”– in case you didn’t catch her casually thoughtless cruelty earlier, when she tells her youngest, “That is such an idiotic stupid thing to do,” because he behaves like a child might. It’s not terribly unlikely they would not know the song. But then nor does the entire high school when Walt later plays it. He wins the contest. Impossible? Perhaps not. There is one more impossibility, however, who does notice. It’s Bernard’s 20 year old student, Lili (Paquin), who is living with both he and Walt, because she “needed a place to crash” and who laughs the plagiarism off as something comparable to what she’s done with others’ poems. Who is she? We’re introduced to her earlier in the film, in class, as she reads from her writing. When driving home, Bernard explains to Walt, “She’s a very risky writer. Very racy. I mean, exhibiting her cunt in that fashion is very risky… You did know that was her cunt, right?” Walt nods. Later, after she moves in, she bumps into Bernard in the kitchen. “I’m your teacher,” he warns her. “I’ve wondered for a long time what it would be like to fuck you.” He does. And, of course, separately, she’s about ready to do the same with Walt, where Baumbach treats us to a POV close-up of the actress’s crotch, before Walt accidentally breaks her nose. Why did Paquin, who is pretty much always wonderful, bother with the role? There is absolutely no role here. She is merely a sex object that helps triangulate plot developments. One more example: The youngest, Frank, seems to disappear into his own world with great frequency. It seems Baumbach is suggesting that he’s developed unsavory private compulsions as a result of familial neglect. More likely, writing him this way affords Baumbach the opportunity to give him dialogue with which “hip” audiences might find some kind of concordance– that which is fashionably unpleasant, as though Baumbach were scratching through the surface veneer of everyday life– such as when he says of his mother’s affair (as he’s drinking a beer, no less): ”Imagine Dom’s dick in Mom’s mouth. You think she has anal sex from Dom?” But never mind. Frank’s scenes are accompanied by a musical motif that might have the only interesting aesthetic charge in the entire film. It’s set to a synthesized number by Tangerine Dream. It sounds like 80s music, because it is– it came from the soundtrack for Risky Business— and it’s interesting because there’s a faint sense that Baumbach is trying to subvert the 80s-movie ideological template. He’s not. A bit later the boy is entirely forgotten, by everyone– abandoned, for three days. While alone, he guzzles bourbon and pukes in the toilet. He tries on a condom in the mirror. Yet some scenes later, when Bernard and Joan are meeting with two pairs of school counselors about both Walt’s plagiarism and Frank’s tendency to wipe his own semen on school grounds, Joan mentions that the boy was abandoned for three full days– a 12 year-old with demonstrable emotional problems– and not only does the school counselor not immediately call child services, but she instead congratulates Joan on her story in the New Yorker. By this point, if the film has not long ago sapped you of care and credulity, I wonder what next fresh hell you’d accept as resonant cinema. Fortunately, though its painfully cheap final metaphor is crudely cribbed from the most vibrant aesthetic work in perhaps the history of America, it is not nearly as long as all that. And no, I’m definitely not referring to The Life Aquatic, though if I were looking to torture myself I know what I’d throw on first. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Robert Yeoman)
Noah Baumbach laughs off everything, even rape and child abuse, in his treacherous Margot at the Wedding (2007), a film I struggled mightily to finish. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more self-satisfied movie. If there’s humor to be found here it’s that Baumbach dares to pit the consistently lousy Jack Black across Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman. Standing with his ass hanging out, peering in the mirror, he observes at one point that his “scrotum hangs lower than his penis.” Even though he often looks like an absurd child across these two major talents, the performative contrast is not so jarring, because no one could be emotionally honest with these deranged, ultra-calibrated characterizations anyway. Baumbach, just like his hideous Squid and the Whale, seems to imply (endlessly) that there’s a certain profundity to teasing out all of the contours of an individual’s potential awfulness. One’s afforded the opportunity to giggle aloofly at the moronic caricatures presented and then argue their merits as dramatic constructions. There is a tendency (the films practically beg you) to frame the material around a notion of abuse. Because the abuses are so constant the film can seem almost like a Brechtian experiment in provocation, which is exactly the kind of justification its advocates would likely use to defend it. So here is Baumbach on that notion, from an interview with Filmmaker Magazine: “I don’t think the characters in the movies are monstrous or even do monstrous things, I think this is how people are. [laughs]” Baumbach’s original intent was to call the film, “Nicole at the Beach,” in reference to Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach. Only someone with a overwhelmingly delusional regard for their own work could or would admit such a thing. With this bravado he even manages to secure the talented Harris Savides, to shoot mostly in hand-held and to give the film a sumptuous texture. But it would be a near complete beat-by-beat synopsis to recount where the film fails. So here is a small starter list of things that I am apparently too philistine to dramatically or comedically comprehend: Why Margot (Kidman) and Pauline’s (Leigh) sister Becky was raped by “the horse trainer” and why this fact is hilarious. Why Margot, and Pauline, and Jack Black’s Malcolm are all somehow simultaneously in the midst of nervous breakdowns, but only in certain scenes, and then maybe not at all. Why pornographic polaroids of Pauline and Malcolm keep popping up everywhere. Why escapees from the set of Deliverance live next door. Why Margot’s son, Claude, is tackled and bit on his neck by their seemingly feral child, and why when he comes home crying about it, he’s promptly slapped by his own mother for insinuating it may be her fault. Why Maisie, the 20 year-old that we eventually learn has made-out with Black (absolutely impossible, unless she’s a psychopath), should wonder aloud to Claude if his own mother is “fuckable”. How Margot reflexively belittling everything and everyone on screen– even to the extent of suggesting her sister’s tied tubes are “symbolic”– is somehow characterization, and not Baumbach just trying to make dialogue “sharp”. John Turturro, in a pointless cameo, momentarily resembles a normal human as he does his level best to save an injured dog. He seems, in his few minutes of screen time, not like a man from another film, but from another planet entirely. Why does Margot find the woman crying for her dying dog so insufferable? Why is Margot a racist, an abusive parent, the worst of sisters, and so ashamed of herself that she can’t even weather a few questions about her own work in front of a handful of people, even though she’s purportedly a reputed novelist? Can Baumbach not handle such an interview, given this is just how people are? What kind of writer could Margot possibly be if the world’s most obvious probing question so flusters her? And if she is hardly a writer, the only discernable idea I can find in the whole film is made moot. This stuff is sordid enough to call masturbatory. And this was all in the script. Some financially suicidal fool gave these people $10 million to make this garbage. It’s hard to recall a film with this wealth of talent that fails more completely. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Harris Savides)
Noah Baumbach produces yet another dud with Greenberg (2010), but it’s leavened a bit by the mutual presence of Greta Gerwig and Rhys Ifans. They are both so strong that even where Baumbach’s incredibly dire opinion of people shines through, they manage to suffuse their performances with a certain warmth. Here, Ben Stiller plays a perversion of a tired cliche: a crank, pseudo-cerebral, who just got out of a mental hospital for something psychosomatic resulting from depression. The presumption of mental illness is like Baumbach finally admitting his own dramatic get-out-jail-free card. His characters have always acted as if they were mentally ill and now we can maybe have a little sympathy. Greenberg is frustrated with the world and everyone in it, offering little else but ironic quips meant to sting and devolving frequently into behavior that betrays that mental illness, but which still feels cheap. He plays down his own Jewishness, but his literary and cinematic forebears are clear: he’s a superficial mix of Moses Herzog1 and Tommy Wilhelm (Saul Bellow creations), and Mickey from Hannah and Her Sisters, with a good bit of Whatever Works’ Boris thrown in for good measure, just without humor or wisdom. The film tosses this self-obsessed New Yorker into 2010 Los Angeles and it is perhaps also meant as some sly inversion of Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer. Gerwig even moonlights as a lounge act, just like Annie did. One would think of course, that this cross section of influences would involve some laughter. The material is still so stunningly smug that laughing feels like a kind of complicity. Greenberg’s tragedy is that he simply isn’t where he thought he’d be at 40. He’s made some mistakes. We learn of a few of them and they seem cheap. He was in a band and turned down a record deal for fear it was too ‘corporate’. One might think that the root of this decision is that Greenberg has some principles, but Baumbach doesn’t even bother to give him anything incisive to say about them, if they actually exist, and so he merely comes off as a fool. Never more so than in several exhibitions of extreme narcissistic psychosis. The smug condescension of lot of this stuff plays like Baumbach playing chicken with his own audience. Whenever the film accidentally borders on something interesting, Baumbach has a way of spoiling it, but in a way so as to enliven it, like the writer/director knows his material is bland without the gasps. The incredible thing is that though he loses the battle–the film grossed $7.4 mil on a $25 mil budget– he must know at this point that the critical establishment will carry him through the war. Stiller, it must be said, has certainly chosen a revealing place to experiment. Why this role? He is very good at modulating the writing, but it can grow so absurd he can hardly save a single scene. He can begin one, as he does at a birthday dinner, by grating on the audience’s nerves just ever so right, so that it seems like Baumbach’s provocations might even have a purpose, but when a much unwanted cake is brought to the table, he ends the scene with a meltdown. “Sit on my dick, asshole!” he blurts as he storms out. As ever, punishingly condescending writing– that he’s unwell we’ve already well learned, how many times does the audience need to chortle at the guy? Yet a moment later, Gerwig’s Florence explains to Ifans’ Ivan, who asked that the cake be brought: “He just got out of a mental hospital.” This is for her an admission, however, that never seems to actually register with her own personal dignity. Over and over again its hard not ask why this often lovely young woman is so stupid. What does it serve the material that she seems more dumb than kind? You can almost hear Baumbach straining with the dialogue to rebalance our expectations every time he cheaply explodes them. If he didn’t do this, he would have no film– at least I find it hard to imagine anyone who would give a shit about these miserable people in such a big world. There’s a line Greenberg delivers mid-film, in exasperation at Ivan, that is like a one-sentence summation of the cinema of Noah Baumbach: “Why is that news to you? It is a small world!” Gerwig, though, really embodies her lostness, as does Ifans. She’s just too talented. And there is even a scene with Stiller and Jennifer Jason Leigh– an awkward lunch– that’s fairly well written and in which the lack of stupidity exhibited by the woman has an actual sting to it. Photographically, however, working with the rather brilliant Harris Savides, Baumbach’s compositions are, like every other work in his increasingly grating oeuvre, borne directly from indie-movie banality. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Harris Savides)
With Frances Ha (2012), Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig conflate seemingly all of the aesthetic strategies of a whole cross-section of films– Jules et Jim, Manhattan, Stranger Than Paradise, Trust, Mauvais Sang– into an exercise in delirious triteness. The film is practically a quilt. In the instance of Mauvais Sang, a scene is practically lifted and spliced in. I think the film is infinitely better than the run of horrific Baumbach micro-aggressions leading to it, because I appreciate the energy and because, though here the well-regarded filmmaker also seems to relish dwelling endlessly his protagonists personal failings, he now betrays a certain love and admiration for his lead. This is probably not surprising– the tabloids tell you that he in fact had quite the love and admiration for his Greenberg supporting star. So he gives her the whole movie. Gerwig is always nervous and fidgety and so her movie has a brisk and self-conscious energy. And as an homage to the city-street freedoms and amours of youth and Baumbach and Gerwig’s inescapable debt to Woody Allen, it’s shot in black and white. The quality of the image owes a great debt to Gordon Willis. This is impressive and a testament to how rapidly technology progresses, as it was shot on a Canon Mark II– a prosumer still-camera that could be got for a couple grand. The deftness of Baumbach’s editorial elisions (the film was cut by the talented Jennifer Lame) coupled with his mostly reasonable musical choices lend the picture a certain verve, sequences built on literally truncated slices of telling behavior that bring Frances to life. It’s nowhere near as audacious as, say, Breathless, but it’s not trying to be. It’s a reappropriation of form, not audacity. The film follows Frances, an aspiring (and failing) young dancer, from her emotional dependence on a roommate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner–the film gently suggests Frances’ heterosexuality as tenuous at best), and through a series of mishaps, misdirections and poor choices that eventuate in her submitting to a quieter kind of disappointment. Like Diane Keaton, Gerwig has a way of making clumsiness endearing and she’s singularly beautiful in a most unusual way. So when she acts like a self-absorbed ninny, the character recovers her footing so naturally that she comes across as an actual human being. There are moments, such as a naive trip to Paris, where Gerwig’s face carries such a poignant charge of melancholy it constricts the throat. The film’s ending is bleaker than is portrayed, which in its lack of cruel obviousness is in itself an artistic progression for Baumbach that I suggest could have only come from her softening effect. This is no great and resonant film– Baumbach and Gerwig’s view is so insular, so self-absorbed and idiosyncratic, that it can grate. What it truly has most in common with Manhattan is that it is soaked in privilege. But it’s a lovely shrug. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Sam Levy)
Baumbach opens While We’re Young (2014) with an exchange from Ibsen’s “The Master Builder.” It expresses an anxiety on the part of the speaker of his risk of replacement by the coming generation. Does Noah Baumbach actually have these fears? He’s made several of the most tiresome films imaginable and he hasn’t even risked replacement by his own generation. But I should be more kind here: Whole swathes of this unfocused film have a confident narrative shorthand that better approximates Woody Allen than anything Baumbach has done, and in flashes the film is actually funny in a way one might have once considered impossible. Ben Stiller and Noami Watts star as Josh and Cornelia. They are a middle-aged couple that needn’t be afraid of any such replacement either, as the film purports that their lives really never got started. From the first, and to find the film funny– and it really is often quite funny– you have to accept this as a fact, though they seem to have things quite good. Ultimately, they are simply immature. Hopelessly so, and perhaps lines like “For the first time in my life, I stopped thinking of myself as a child imitating an adult,” later confirm as much. Josh is a failing documentarian and (a wry and very truthful irony) a professor of documentary filmmaking . In true Baumbachian form, we never quite learn what Cornelia really does. Or even who she really is, although Watts is such a presence that something shines through anyway. Baumbach even writes her several scenes of her own, but they are largely empty. When Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), two mid-20s hipsters, walk into their lives they altogether come to form a sick symbiosis: For Josh and Cornelia, Jamie and Darby make them feel alive again. For Jamie and Darby, well, this is where the film reveals Baumbach’s seeming value system. Early on, the contrast between the two couples is the film’s funniest material. Baumbach’s satirizing of hipster culture against the banalities and boredoms of a certain age are done in merciless juxtapositions. Jamie also wants to make documentary films. It eventually comes out that he audited Josh’s class and inserted himself into his life merely because Cornelia’s father, Leslie (a terrific Charles Grodin), is a legend in the documentary world. Jamie, played with a blithe devilishness by Driver, is like a fedora wearing Iago who at one point says: “Nobody owns anything. If I hear a song I like, or a story, it’s mine. It’s mine to use.” We simply have to accept that a young man in Brooklyn in 2014 would have ambitions to be the new Albert Maysles so intense that he would stoop to the lows he does, because if we don’t then Baumbach’s metaphors collapse. What are those metaphors? Several actually, from generational authenticity to truth in representation to the cheapening of artistic expression to plagiarism and documentary ethics. There are some great scenes, such as the first between Josh and Cornelia and their friends, new parents played by Adam Horowitz (yes, that one) and Marina Dizzia, who make their newfound parenthood seem like humanity’s greatest moral triumph. And there are some terrible ones, like an Ayahuasca ceremony that seemingly never ends, and pretty much anything in the film’s final act. That last third of the film descends into cynicism and manages to thoroughly undo any of the satirical victories Baumbach earlier managed. Jamie, in his many deceits, triumphs, with the tacit acceptance of Leslie. Josh makes a fool of himself at Leslie’s Lincoln Center honorary and Cornelia, as she does throughout the film, has no position of her own, as if she’s there merely to accord with the final determinations of the men. Afterward, they have a conversation outside: “I’m 44 and there are things I’ll never do, things I won’t have. What’s the opposite of ‘the world is your oyster’?” Josh asks. “I wish we could just go back and meet each other all over again,” she replies. The film jumps forward a year. They’ve decided to adopt a Haitian child (ha) and as they sit, there’s another exchange. Of Jamie, who is featured in a magazine, Cornelia sighs, “Well, the evil is out there in the world.” “No, you were right. He’s not evil. He’s just young,” Josh replies, in ol’ Noah’s cleverly meaningless fashion. Across from them a toddler is playing with– enchanted by, more like– a cell phone. These are those decisions in the cinema of Noah Baumbach that, at this point, I just accept as his– idiosyncratic? to be kind?– value system. But as they regard the child, what registers on their face? Acceptance? Delight? A rueful grin? No: Horror. — (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Sam Levy)
There’s a moment midway through Noah Baumbach’s derivative, borderline sociopathic comedy Mistress America (2015) where the titular Mistress, Brooke (Greta Gerwig), is approached in a bar by a former classmate (Rebecca Henderson). The woman explains how, back in high school, Brooke and another classmate humiliated her, repeatedly. “The way you treated me really messed me up for a long time,” she explains. Brooke, maybe drunk (though Gerwig plays the character with a constant sort of drunkenness), denying none of it, replies: “Everyone is an asshole in high school.” She dismisses the woman: “I feel bad for the 13 year old girl that was you, but I don’t feel bad for you now.” “I was 17,” the woman clarifies, stunned by her obliviousness. The scene ends with Brooke suggesting that they only humiliated her because it was true, she is bitter, which is why she’s held onto the grudge for so long. The woman retreats, on the edge of tears. And that’s it. That’s the scene. The idea, I suppose, is that Brooke has a history awful enough that she’s in some kind of constant misanthropic, narcissistic fugue state. In other words, she is a Noah Baumbach creation. In case you haven’t yet noticed, I don’t particularly care for Baumbach’s brand of sociopathic chortling. As Armond White put it, perhaps more egregiously than I’m willing to go: “You look at Noah Baumbach’s work, and you see he’s an asshole.” Brooke certainly is, at least if she wasn’t first a manifestation of treacherous writing. The scene is a microcosm of the absurdity of the whole movie and the absurdity of Baumbach’s cinema. There are like a half dozen things about it, and the subsequent conversation she has with the film’s lead, Tracy– played nicely by the charismatic actress Lola Kirke– that are completely contrived. Even Jennifer Lame’s cutting, which lent Baumbach’s prior two films a nice energy, is straining. But here’s the rub: Tracy has no reason to be subjected to this nightmare of a woman other than that Baumbach is– seemingly sincerely– trying to tread ground so brilliantly realized in the Zuckerman novels of Philip Roth and which was explored contemporaneously by Woody Allen. He still writes Tracy as though she has some reason to like Brooke, even to admire Brooke. As Brooke totes her around New York City, she absorbs new wonders like some starry-eyed farm girl first experiencing the big city. But she’s from suburban New Jersey– not rural Montana. Tracy and Brooke get together because their respective single parents are soon to be married– so they are going to be sisters. But Tracy is really there because she is an aspiring fiction writer desperately trying to gain acceptance from her university’s literary society. Brooke is the perfect material for fiction if you are looking to write prose versions of Noah Baumbach characters, which even she, naive and only 18, knows is like kibble to the millennial generation. The film follows the two, along with a host of supporting characters there to fill out needed plot developments, to Connecticut. There are a million silly entanglements to this interminable screwball comedy set-piece, the main thrust being that Brooke is trying to gain funding for a restaurant. Baumbach and Gerwig satirize the wealthy Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind) and her husband, Dylan (Michael Chernus), a fumbling, grotesque investment banker for Goldman Sachs. Eventually, the short story Tracy wrote about Brooke’s mindlessness is pulled out and everyone collectively reads it. They then excoriate Tracy and stand her up for questioning. I have all the same thoughts I normally have by this point: Why have Woody Allen and Philip Roth been tossed in the trash so that this vacuous garbage can poorly reappropriate them while in life its makers admonish them? Gerwig, who co-wrote the script, has said of Allen: “If I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in [To Rome With Love]” What is it, I’m curious, that she has suddenly learned? Her script here ends with a narration, presumably from Tracy’s short story, that likens Brooke to a force of nature: “Those people were nothing compared to her. They were matches to her bonfire.” And finally: “She was the last cowboy… The world was changing and her kind didn’t have anywhere to go. Being a beacon of hope for lesser people is a lonely business.” Sheesh. (w: Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig, c: Sam Levy)
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) is another complete revue of the cynical, stultifying cinema of Baumbach. A crude reappropriation of Hannah and Her Sisters, with some tepid allusions (intentional?) to Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, the picture, of course, manages to combine its many influences into far less. It’s yet again a challenge to wrestle with how terrible the material is. The film stars Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller as essentially the same person. Hoffman is Harold Meyerowitz, the patriarch, a sculptor of modest acclaim whose star has faded to such a point that it may never have been much more than delusion. He has two sons, Matthew (Stiller) and Danny (Sandler) and a daughter, Jean (Elizabeth Marvel). All three of them are Noah Baumbach conceptions: emotionally stunted to repeating personal embarrassment, interchangeably articulate or inarticulate depending on where it serves cheap comedy, hypocritical in neon-arrow exhibitions, and rife with disdain. At one point, Harold picks up an aged edition of “Buddenbrooks”. “I think this is my copy,” he says. Thomas Mann via… Noah Baumbach. I guess its the malignant patriarchy roughly described on the dust jacket? Danny does have a daughter, Eliza (Grace Van Patten). She’s an oblivious, emotionally volatile young woman with preoccupations akin to the Instagram generation. This is fine and reasonable, except where we learn she is a film student at Bard, and when Danny plays for Harold and his mother-in-law (Emma Thompson) her newest student film. In it, she humiliates herself to such a degree that it’s almost as if Baumbach envisions her movie as a form of dramatic entrapment. As in: If you feel above this material the problem must be with you, not the well-meaning young woman (or the middle-aged filmmaker). The family nods in approval– “she’s got real talent.” The Meyerowitz Stories has a parenthetical: “New and Selected,” and so it plays as a series of episodes, a cuteness reminiscent of Baumbach’s partner in crime, Wes Anderson. Each one moves toward an escalation, often behavioral, where the characters speak and then leap from one octave to the next, until screaming, at which point the editor, Jennifer Lame, cuts them off and flashes the next title card. Sandler can’t act, and so when he stumbles into occasional graces critics fawn over him because they’re probably privately guilty of criticizing his funnier movies– that they likely enjoyed far more than this– as being of less worth. But his gravelly screams punctuate more than one section and one is reminded of those funnier films. At least if “The Waterboy” angrily slap-boxed his own brother in public, or smashed up the car of a senile senior citizen, or slapped a beer out of his own daughter’s mouth and thereafter declared himself a great parent, we might laugh because “The Waterboy” was a total comedic concoction. Stiller, who is a better actor, is revealed as the same kind of fool. Early on, he screams at Harold’s departing car, “I beat you! I beat you!” after a fight in which he challenges the sincerity of the man’s regard for him. Later, he says of his own five year old son, “I don’t know, sometimes I think maybe I sit this kid out and start another family and then he finds me when he’s twenty-one.” Finally, Jean, who is portrayed by Elizabeth Marvel as a flighty screwball, relays a pointlessly redundant story meant to reveal Harold’s callousness and disregard, in case you hadn’t gotten the point yet. In it, a lecherous friend of her father (the senile senior citizen already mentioned, played by Judd Hirsch) masturbates in plain view of her as she showers off at a public beach. She tells Harold, and he tells her to leave the man be. So Danny and Matthew– now apparently enraged beyond any sense of self-preservation– can think only and immediately to smash the man’s car to bits. Why is this funny? Well, it’s not, but they try to make it funny by adding a bit of prop humor. Finally, the film descends on Harold’s newest show, at Bard. Matthew and Danny each give a speech that rings of Vinterberg’s The Celebration, and yet again serves to show just how distant is the talent of Baumbach from not only his artistic forebears, but his working contemporaries. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Robbie Ryan)
Anchored by several very strong performances, Marriage Story (2019) is perhaps Noah Baumbach’s most mature film. Ostensibly based, at least loosely, on the disentegration of his own marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh, the writing has a charge of intimate knowledge and pain. It starts off with a dramatically novel tone– Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson each reading aloud a letter they wrote to one another at a therapists directive, enunciating the many things they love about one another. This is to kick off a divorce proceeding that, predictably, descends into frustration, fury, and grief. There are scenes of emotional brutality here that really sear, and which elevate the film. Most notably, there is no condescension and very little judgement in the material, which is both refreshing and unusual for Baumbach. A cynical read on the difference between early and late Baumbach is that, after the divorce herein dramatized, the eminently talented Greta Gerwig entered his life, and his films suspiciously improved immensely. The film owes a great debt to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. The material acknowledges this, though the picture is very much its own, as much an expose on the perils of a failing marriage as on the perils of the modern industry of marriage, and how it transforms the notion of love and partnership into a kind of war of attrition. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Robbie Ryan)
As though trying to induce some kind of pretension-singularity event akin to the mechanics of a collapsing star, Noah Baumbach directs Don Dellilo’s celebrated 1985 novel White Noise into a motion picture in 2022. Surprisingly the film is not maddening, but rather just boring. Dellilo’s novel is written in an idiosyncratic style such that “White Noise” is considered the other major landmark exhibition of his unique aesthetic. That aesthetic, which juxtaposes– almost alchemically– often wry, self-conscious ruminations on the nature and vicissitudes of American life with passages so delicate and beautiful that they read almost like tone-poems on America, is uniquely unsuited for the cinema. In the medium in which he worked, the medley and musicality of Delillo’s prose would later reach an apotheosis in his masterpiece, “Underworld”. That is another book that is extra-cinematic. It is also, like White Noise, extra-uniquely unsuited for Noah Baumbach, whose body of navel-gazing, pseudo-literate misanthropy situates his talents as near to Delillo as we are to the Crab Nebula. Anyway, as for the picture, every scene plays as though Baumbach’s main mission is to hint at his own audacity. I can’t recount them– life is too short. The picture is a mess, tonally way too overwrought and not helped in that respect by what is essentially a roster-long miscasting. But then how can a film not be miscast when rendering dialogue that, again given the context of its medium, was almost certainly written for endless sonic and suggestive reinterpretation? This film benefits nothing and no one perceivable. (w: Noah Baumbach, c: Lol Crawley)
1 An essay by Menachem Feuer for “Schlemiel Theory” nicely contrasts Bellow’s exceptional novel with Greenberg and ends in the following well-worded conclusion: “In contrast to Baumbach’s Greenberg, who also writes letters with fervor, Herzog evinces hope in the midst of failure. Greenberg, according to Ian Parker of The New Yorker evinces the opposite. He is what Walter Benjamin would call a “scarecrow of determinism.” What was lost in translation is the sad and yet comic nature of Herzog’s choice to be a dreamer rather than a cunning and aggressive man. Herzog finds his emblem in…a shoulder shrug which, in translation, says: ‘If I’m out of my mind, it’s alright with me.'”
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