Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is returning from New York to his native LA to housesit for his brother, Phillip (Chris Messina, who may be familiar from 2009’s Julie and Julia; here he doesn’t have enough scenes to settle, once and for all, the question of whether or not he’s capable of chewing with his mouth closed), who’s taking his family to Vietnam for a few weeks. Roger has just finished a stint in a mental hospital, and though his troubles are never detailed, the more time we spend with him the more his problems seem obvious: He’s simply overwhelmed by the demands of the world, essentially unable to take care of himself. In an early scene, Florence (Greta Gerwig), who’s Phillip’s personal assistant and has been put more or less at Roger’s disposal, asks him to write down anything he wants her to pick up at the grocery store, and he’s unable to think of anything but whiskey and ice cream sandwiches. In another scene, he decides to give the swimming pool a try, and makes it across exactly once, a desperate, flailing dog paddle that looks, at times, a lot like drowning. In just these two scenes, we get a clearer sense of Roger’s character than most films manage in their entirety.
As he reconnects with people from his past—ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who co-wrote the story with director Noah Baumbach) and best friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans, bringing effortless world-weariness and warmth to the role)—it becomes apparent that everyone has grown up but Roger, who’s hopelessly, helplessly stuck in the past. He offers Ivan a drink only to find that Ivan has traded booze for fatherhood and responsibility; he shows up at a party Beth is giving to find it overrun by kids. “Is this a children’s party?” he mutters to himself. It’s not, but the adult parties of 40-year-olds tend to look that way. Over coffee, Beth, now a mother of two, has no memory of the events from their relationship that have been preserved so clearly in Roger’s mind and which retain such meaning for him. Roger drifts through these early scenes, obsessively applying Chapstick and bumming rides (he doesn’t drive, he repeatedly tells people, and we don’t even have to ask why; Roger is such a twitchy, oblivious mess it’s impossible to imagine him behind the wheel). Even as he begins a halting romance with the equally, though differently, damaged Florence, he seems barely able to notice anyone but himself. Through it all he has the irritated expression and manner of a man who’s totally put out by the world.
Being put out, in fact, consumes a lot of Roger’s energy. One of his favorite pastimes is writing angry letters to people who displease him: The CEO of Starbucks, the customer service at American Airlines, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But it isn’t just the faceless bureaucrats who earn his ire. He’s put out that Ivan doesn’t drink, he’s put out that everyone seems to be a stranger, and he’s put out that no one ever calls him on his birthday. What Roger’s beginning to realize—well, not realize, exactly, but bump up against—is that when you don’t take time for people, they don’t take time for you. Of course, Roger perceives this only in self-pitying terms: It isn’t that he’s neglected his relationships, it’s that everyone has let him down. Everything about Roger, in fact, begins with the suffix “self-“: He is self-absorbed, self-consumed, and generally selfish.
In fact, it’s hard to bring another film character to mind who can compete with Roger for sheer callous inconsideration—and certainly it’s rare in a character by whom we’re supposed to be, in some way, charmed—and herein lies the main problem with the film. No movie I’ve seen this year has been so efficient or effective at creating a rich, complex, vivid character. But as a viewing experience it can be trying, because Roger is not just vivid, but vividly awful. He takes the patient, accommodating Ivan for granted, displaying no real interest in Ivan’s life beyond urging him to divorce his estranged wife (the subtleties and gray areas of a decade-long relationship with the mother of one’s child are lost on Roger, who sees romance, like everything else, strictly in terms of what it can offer him). Worse is his treatment of the sweet, lost Florence, a character I could only pity for her bad luck in finding Roger: she is selfless where he is a narcissist; she gives where all he does is take; she has a basic inability to stand up for herself, where he walks all over everyone he meets. Their relationship is, I suppose, meant to be sweet—two misfits finding each other—but at times it feels like an artful portrait of the beginning of a classically dysfunctional relationship, the answer to the question we’ve all asked at one time or another, of someone we know: “How on earth did two people who make each other so unhappy ever get together in the first place?”
Putting unpleasant characters on the screen is no crime, but Baumbach isn’t John Cassavetes or Neal Labute, and uncompromising unpleasantness isn’t his main goal. This is meant to be an endearing character study of a complicated man, but charmlessness is a big hurdle in this kind of film. By the end, Roger makes some subtle movement toward growth, tentative steps toward being able to recognize the needs of others, toward being able to step outside himself, however briefly. But it feels like too little, too late. By then, Baumbach and Stiller have done such an expert job of creating the tiresome Roger that it’s hard to root for him. Roger is, in a word, a dick. By the beginning of the film everyone has long since lost realized this, and by the end of the film, so did I.
