<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Noah Baumbach&amp;#039;s Greenberg marks a return to form for the director who hit movie heaven with his savage, Oscar-nominated comedy The Squid and the Whale five years ago, only to plummet back to earth with Margot at the Wedding. Like those films, Greenberg is about family and the ability to make connections\u2014or not\u2014that proceeds from how we are brought up, and the movie&amp;#039;s wickedly humorous edge is nicely serrated. But instead of the earlier films&amp;#039; on-screen ensembles, Baumbach and his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who cowrote the story and has a small but pungent part, let us sense the ties that bind (and bind, and bind) through the neurotic prism of Ben Stiller&amp;#039;s Roger Greenberg. He could have been the kid at the end of Margot doing his best to flee Nicole Kidman&amp;#039;s voracious, seductive mom, or the teen in Squid whose dad\u2014a brilliant Jeff Daniels\u2014assiduously teaches him how to be unbearable. Too often for his own good, Greenberg is unbearable, so absorbed by anxiety and a furious sense of grievance that he&amp;#039;s grossly insensitive to the people around him. He&amp;#039;s not much of a grown-up; he&amp;#039;s too tormented for that and, more exasperating, too attached to his own neuroses. But despite his crankiness, there&amp;#039;s something universal about him. In the course of the movie, Greenberg turns 41, and his future and our fascination both hang on the increasingly urgent question that Greta Gerwig&amp;#039;s lovely, commonsensical young Florence\u2014his brother&amp;#039;s assistant\u2014indirectly poses to him: No matter what made him this way, can he salvage a decent life for himself, or is he terminally screwed up? Behind that question lurks one that haunts just about all of us: Do people ever change for the better?  The film is set in Los Angeles, where Greenberg grew up and has returned, after one stint in New York and another in a mental institution. We never learn what put him in the latter, but when a minor character gossips that he may have tried to kill himself, it sounds so wrong that you realize with a start that Greenberg isn&amp;#039;t fragile, he&amp;#039;s on a mission. Supposedly in L.A. just to house- and dog-sit for six weeks while his younger brother (Chris Messina) vacations with the wife and kids in Vietnam, Greenberg tools around revisiting the past, where he clearly feels that his life broke off. This is not an entirely successful enterprise, since envy and paranoia eat like acid into every connection he makes, whether a prickly one with a highly successful, former college bandmate (Mark Duplass) or a reunion with his patient, soft-spoken old friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans), who&amp;#039;s living in a motel while separated from his wife and son. But Greenberg is too self-obsessed to notice or care about other people&amp;#039;s troubles. The exception is his former girlfriend Beth ( Jason Leigh), a divorced mother of two who sets him straight as he delusionally tries to rekindle their 15-year-old relationship.  Stiller, so adept at extravagant comic characters (Tropic Thunder, anyone?), briefly gets to play one in a party scene of twentysomethings in which he does a line of coke as if it were the elixir of youth and goes bouncing all over the place. But the rest of the time he takes his talent to a harsher place, with a performance as admirable as his character is not. Looking angry and haggard, he doesn&amp;#039;t try to make you like him; when Greenberg screams obscenities at Ivan for giving him a cheery birthday surprise, you might want to smack him if you weren&amp;#039;t convulsing with horrified laughter. Baumbach is at his best when he explores the wounds that families inflict. He has a gift for staring at human frailty\u2014our meanness, fear, and distress\u2014so intently that he burrows down to its absurd and hapless core, and Stiller&amp;#039;s right there with him. I&amp;#039;m not sure how much of this we could take if it weren&amp;#039;t for Gerwig and her own breakout performance. The queen of the nouveau slacker film genre known as mumblecore, she makes the 25-year-old Florence the movie&amp;#039;s leavening agent, for Greenberg and for us. Florence is a bit clumsy and naive, but she&amp;#039;s immensely likable and strong when it matters. Even when she&amp;#039;s funny, Gerwig wisely never plays her for laughs. Lecturing herself about falling into bed too easily with this guy or that, she says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got to stop doing things just because they feel good&amp;quot;\u2014a screwball comic line worthy of Judy Holliday. Oh no, don&amp;#039;t go there, you think when you realize that she&amp;#039;s attracted to Greenberg. She&amp;#039;s water to his tormenting fire, if he can ever get his head out of the past. But whether he has the sense to realize that is no safe bet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a10910/its-all-relative-noah-baumbachs-greenberg-413592/>