Movies You Might Have Missed: Noah Baumbach's Greenberg

Despite the film bombing at the box office, the characters feel so real that one can easily imagine their lives continuing long after the credits roll

Ben Stiller stars as failed musician Roger Greenberg in Noah Baumbach's 'Greenberg'

Noah Baumbach is back this month with The Meyerowitz Stories, a film being released on Netflix that was in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The director has quietly gone about creating a body of work over the past couple of decades that suggests independent cinema is still flourishing in the era of the big-budget blockbuster.

Greenberg (2010) stars Ben Stiller, a regular Baumbach collaborator and star of his latest offering. The film was a box-office bomb, grossing just $7m against a $25m budget. One has to imagine at least part of this failure was down to a central character audiences struggled to warm to.

The eponymous Roger Greenberg returns to Los Angeles to house-sit for his brother after years spent living in New York. A misanthrope haunted by a major missed opportunity during his days in a band, he is now a carpenter who finds a kindred spirit in his brother’s assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig).

​Baumbach and Stiller combine to produce a protagonist at turns pathetic, selfish and insecure. Like Mike Leigh’s best work, these characters feel so real that one can easily imagine their lives continuing long after the credits roll. We empathise with Greenberg even while being appalled by some of his behaviour.

If The Squid and the Whale, arguably Baumbach’s masterpiece, gave us a complicated male lead in Jeff Daniels’ father character, here he fashions a figure even more emotionally complex and it’s safe to say Stiller has never been better. In the early drafts of the screenplay, the character was written as a man his early thirties. Inspired by the idea of casting Stiller, the entire script was rewritten and it is somehow more tragic that he is still so lost in his early forties.

Some saw this as a mere indulgence, a film fashioned from little more than the worst excesses of independent cinema, but such criticisms miss the point. This is not a romantic comedy and as such has far more in common with reality; it is about two lost souls attempting to forge a meaningful connection in a world they feel has abandoned them. By the climax, there seems like the genuine possibility of incremental change, and Baumbach’s genius is that we care.

All that, and a soundtrack by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy – file this one under essential Netflix viewing.​