The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (Noah Baumbach, 2017)

To friends, acquaintances, and strangers, the life of sculptor and retired professor Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) looks like a success, but the man himself nurtures jealousy of his peers’ wider acclaim and animosity toward an art world that has failed to appreciate him sufficiently. He sold a work to the Whitney decades ago, yet it’s indicative of his status that no one is exactly sure where it is being stored. In THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED), Harold’s self-centeredness has contributed to the strained relationship he has with the three children his four marriages have produced.

Danny (Adam Sandler) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), the two oldest, share a mother and the sense that they were never especially important to their father. Such treatment fuels Danny to be a doting dad with his daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten). While Matthew (Ben Stiller) is perceived, not incorrectly, to be the favored child, he carries his share of grudges regarding Harold. Despite their frustrations, all three still seek approval from him. Danny and Jean strive to secure a retrospective show of Harold’s work. Although Danny objects, Matthew tries to arrange the sale of the big, costly New York City house where Harold and his current wife Maureen (Emma Thompson) reside.

The episodic nature and title of THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) suggest that the glimpses of this dysfunctional family don’t tell everything but encapsulate the fundamental truths about them and viewpoints within this unit. Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s film depicts a period of critical transition. Danny has separated from his wife and needs direction. Eliza is starting college. Matthew is at a crossroads in his marriage and career. Harold is trying to adjust to retirement. Although the chapter-like structure leaves gaps, it contains the greatest hits and misses in Meyerowitz family history. Life brings new developments, but these events all tend to circle back to be understood through the lens of old resentments. The stories each person tells himself and herself have as much to do with constructing their identities as what actually happens.

Baumbach’s comedies about families often have a strong undercurrent of anger. MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, and WHILE WE’RE YOUNG, among others, laugh at the ways people can get maligned and twisted in their most central relationships, but the humor provides a thin cover for bitterness. The characters in THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES exist in the state of a soft boil. Their emotions are adequately hot without making them hard. Baumbach crafts a warm, humane movie accepting of people in spite of their faults. The Meyerowitzes aren’t going to resolve all of their differences in the course of the film or beyond it, but Baumbach shows why blood ties and shared history can be worth saving in spite of the aggravations.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES cast is superb at conveying the commonly understood order and unspoken, or whispered, opinions in families. Baumbach excels at capturing the dynamic in which each person assumes the role they’ve adopted through the years whether or not they’ve changed outside the family. He’s also really sharp and funny in observing how parents and siblings don’t fully understand what the adult kids do in their jobs and how watching TV together can be as meaningful as anything in maintaining the peace.

Sandler has proven to be a good actor when working with directors who can modulate his tendencies. Here he’s quite affecting playing a loving father who transforms into an ignored little boy desperate for validation when around his dad. His tender scenes with Van Patten reveal Danny at his best. His goodness is visible in how he’s attentive in a way that Harold wasn’t and isn’t and also in how she protects him when she knows he’s vulnerable. The ease and honesty they have with one another contrasts powerfully with how Harold and Danny communicate. Hoffman is funny and tragic as a wrecking ball of a patriarch, one whose narrow vision fails to acknowledge that in chasing acceptance from the world at large he’s missed the love those closest to him are so eager to give. A life has many potential narratives, but it’s the one we select, rather than what is written for us, that determines if we are satisfied.

Grade: A

Mistress America

MISTRESS AMERICA (Noah Baumbach, 2015)

In MISTRESS AMERICA eighteen-year-old Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) is having trouble fitting in as a freshman at Barnard College, so she’s relieved to find someone to hang out with in New York City when she meets thirty-year-old stepsister-to-be Brooke Cardinas (Greta Gerwig). Brooke appears to live a glamorous urban life and dabble in seemingly everything. She works as an interior designer and SoulCycle instructor, came up with a t-shirt design that she claims her friend Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind) stole, is kicking around an idea for a television show, and is entertaining investors for a restaurant she plans to open.

When Brooke’s boyfriend pulls out of the restaurant deal, she is in desperate need of financing. Prompted by a fortune teller, Brooke goes to Greenwich, Connecticut with Tracy, her friend Tony (Matthew Shear), and his girlfriend Nicolette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) in tow to make a pitch for money to her wealthy ex-fiancé Dylan (Michael Chernus), who’s married to her nemesis Mamie-Claire.

The soon-to-be sisters in MISTRESS AMERICA are simpatico in sarcasm and self-obsession. Their conversations consist of pathological feedback loops in which they speak disparagingly of those not of their caliber or who have wronged them in some way. Brooke spots a captive audience to dazzle in Tracy, probably because she has not bore witness to Brooke’s trail of professional flameouts. Tracy enjoys being around Brooke, who is fun, brash, and accepting of her company even as she doesn’t seem to listen, but in her the literature major also discovers a rich source of inspiration for the thinly fictionalized short story she has started writing. Both yearn to make their marks on the world. The comedy comes from the symbiotic relationship between these miserable people searching for the answers, reassuring each other of their superiority, and yet failing to achieve their dreams. They can virtually complete each other’s sentences, not so much from closeness but because of their shared disdain.

Gerwig plays Brooke as a force of nature, the type of person who becomes the center of attention in whatever situation she finds herself in. The character is a marked contrast from her notable roles in GREENBERG and FRANCES HA, her previous collaborations with director Noah Baumbach. As in those films Gerwig plays a young woman seeking where she belongs, but in MISTRESS AMERICA, which she co-wrote with Baumbach, she’s a screwball egotist. In a strange way she remains a sympathetic figure because her big talk is clearly indicative of compensating for feeling inferior.

Baumbach has always been very good at guiding actors to convey his caustic wit. With MISTRESS AMERICA he demonstrates a deft ability for choreographing farce. Relationships are tested after Brooke and company barge into Mamie-Claire and Dylan’s home and bring most of the film’s second half to a furious pace powered by incidents and accusations. The speed with which these scenes move relate to the flurry of distractions the protagonists bury themselves in to make it easier to ignore the failure of their pursuits. As unbecoming as Brooke and Tracy’s behavior can be, MISTRESS AMERICA emerges as a funny film about the painful path to maturity through accepting one’s shortcomings and committing to being a better person.

Grade: B

While We're Young

WHILE WE’RE YOUNG (Noah Baumbach, 2014)

Each generation tends to look at the next one with some suspicion that they don’t live up to the standards they hold dear. As the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. With Generation X in middle age, the time has come for them--us, in my case--to judge the habits, interests, and attitudes of millenials. In WHILE WE’RE YOUNG 44-year-old documentarian Josh (Ben Stiller) and his 43-year-old producer wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) strike up a friendship with 25-year-old couple Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Josh and Cornelia are childless and feeling increasingly alienated from their friends because of it, so they are drawn to the burgeoning filmmaker husband and his ice cream-making wife. Josh is especially taken with Jamie’s relentless optimism, DIY ethos, and unconstrained tastes and tries them on for size.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach opens WHILE WE’RE YOUNG with a passage from Ibsen’s THE MASTER BUILDER about being fearful of young people outside but encouraged to open the door followed by James Murphy’s toy box-sounding cover of David Bowie’s “Golden Years”. The film ends with the Bowie original and Wings’ “Let ‘Em In” on the soundtrack. The quotation and songs provide mirror bookends representing the aspirations Josh and Cornelia examine when faced with younger adults’ ways. Are they serious and cultured or sentimental and domesticized? When discussing their lives early in the film, Josh says, “Maybe the point is we have the freedom. What we do with it isn’t so important.” The pointed comedy of the comment is that the freedom they profess to cherish is really just a wasted resource they cling to rather than admit they’ve entered another time in their lives.

Baumbach mines the humor in the resistance to adapting to a new life stage, the foolishness of trying to act younger, and the perceived ridiculousness of how millenials assert their independence and preferences. Editor Jennifer Lame cuts Cornelia attending a mommy and me music class as if she’s entered a house of horrors. Josh suffers the indignity of looking older than he is by borrowing today’s youth fashion as if it suits him. WHILE WE’RE YOUNG practically drips contempt for what twentysomethings consider cool. Baumbach obliterates some easy targets, but the film is no less funny because of it.

Driver’s embodiment of a stereotypical hipster is a consistent source of jokes. After Josh’s infatuation with Jamie has ended, he describes his counterpart as imitating a sincere person he once saw. Baumbach doesn’t withhold any criticism of a younger generation he thinks can be vacuous and disingenuous, yet he doesn’t spare those in middle age. Where Jamie lacks boundaries and hides his careerism, Josh prizes the purist notion of not selling out and retaining authenticity, which are fine ideals until they become stifling to the point of inaction. WHILE WE’RE YOUNG soaks in the bitter comedy that comes in realizing that everyone is searching for answers.

Grade: B+

Frances Ha

FRANCES HA (Noah Baumbach, 2012)

A judgmental person would probably tell directionless 27-year-old Frances (Greta Gerwig) that she ought to get her act together, but she manages to get by even though she still hasn’t carved out much of a career or love life like her peers.  She seems generally happy--or at least puts on a brave face--about her apprenticeship at a New York City dance company and holds out hope that her break might be upcoming.  Any disappointment is easier to take knowing she has the support of her longtime best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner).  

The two pals in FRANCES HA are still on good terms when Sophie tells Frances she doesn’t want to renew the lease for their Brooklyn apartment because she can get into her dream place in Manhattan.  Frances can’t afford to move there, but she’s pleased Sophie has found what she wants.  Still, the change in living arrangements gradually causes Frances to examine what her life is, although reflection tends to come when a particular matter is most urgent, never earlier.

Co-written by Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach, FRANCES HA provides a sharp, fleet, and very funny look at female friendship and the acceptance of adult responsibilities.  Gerwig and Sumner are hilarious communicating in the kind of shorthand that develops between those exceptionally close and expressing the comfort between Frances and Sophie.  Whether it’s their conversational give-and-take or play-fighting, here are two friends who are utterly enchanted that they accept and understand one another on such a deep level.  Films tend to portray friendships, particularly female ones, in terms of competition or utility, but FRANCES HA depicts one that is formed out of equally supportive individuals.  Like any relationship, theirs will experience the occasional turbulence, but it’s easy to believe these two will still be tight decades down the line.  The joy and empathy between Frances and Sophie spill off the screen.      

Frances often makes bad but not fatal choices.  She’s perpetually gawky, yet Gerwig’s endearing performance conveys the character’s ease with herself and her mistakes, whether she’s putting her feet in her mouth at a dinner party or falling over them on the sidewalk.  Gerwig’s brilliant stroke is shaping the protagonist’s natural strangeness into something that is uniquely Frances.  She doesn’t exhibit false or manufactured quirkiness but captures the kind of weirdness that’s different for but specific to everyone. Behind her owl-like glasses as Sophie, Sumner makes for an excellent acidic complement to the sweet Frances.

Although each character in FRANCES HA comes from some level of economic privilege, money is something constantly at the forefront of Frances’ mind.  She isn’t completely broke but is highly conscious of what’s in (or absent from) her bank account. Baumbach uses the locations and space to remind of her financial reality, as being aware of one’s surroundings can be as indicative of status as checking one’s balance.

Sam Levy’s black-and-white cinematography and Jennifer Lame’s fragmented editing proudly display FRANCES HA’s French New Wave influences.  Stylistically Baumbach isn’t doing anything new, yet this character study packed with urbane wit feels foreign and thrilling in comparison to current trends in film comedy.  With a major assist from Gerwig, Baumbach’s droll examination of aimless adulthood also produces the director's most inviting film since 1995’s KICKING AND SCREAMING.   

Grade: A

Greenberg

GREENBERG (Noah Baumbach, 2010)

In the dramedy GREENBERG Ben Stiller’s forty-year-old Roger Greenberg returns to California fresh off of a nervous breakdown and still nurturing his bitterness about pretty much everything. For six weeks Greenberg is to watch over his brother’s house, but doing nothing, save for the occasional carpentry, is his primary goal. He meets up with some old friends and begins a romance of a sort with his brother’s 25-year-old assistant Florence Greta Gerwig, but Greenberg can be so intent on being miserable and dragging others down with him that he’s in danger of pushing everyone away.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s most recent films, THE SQUID AND THE WHALE and MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, have found humor and pain through the examination of hurt people hurting people. GREENBERG continues that thematic exploration with the study of a prickly and self-sabotaging title character who isn’t a charming rogue but, to put it bluntly, a jerk.

Greenberg feels his life has spun out of control and attempts to bring order to it, whether through rehearsing his behavior, writing complaint letters, or lashing out when he feels others may be hitting a nerve. Stiller often makes Greenberg’s hostility and rants funny, but his strongest work comes in exercising the character’s worst reflexes without trolling for sympathy. The performance requires looking beyond the surface to see a wounded soul who believes he can only feel better by making others miserable.

Florence spots the vulnerability Greenberg obscures with his gruff nature, which is why Gerwig’s performance is key to making the film successful. Florence and Greenberg are kindred spirits searching for the same answers. She just hasn’t reached the moment when disappointment and doubt transform into despair. In inhabiting Florence’s awkward and unguarded optimism, Gerwig lets the character demonstrate another way of dealing with life’s bruises without becoming a redemptive figure.

Baumbach’s writing and direction of these characters display more of a novelistic touch that can make them tough to like all the time, but the approach produces a deeply felt view of flawed individuals.

Grade: B+

Margot at the Wedding

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (Noah Baumbach, 2007)

Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are not the closest sisters, and a reconciliation hardly seems imminent in MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. Margot is a fiction writer whose work liberally borrows from her family members' least proud moments. That explains the long chill in their relationship, but Pauline offers an olive branch anyway when Margot comes to visit. It makes little impact as Margot would rather use it to beat her sibling.

Margot and her son Claude (Zane Pais) have traveled to the island where her parents' home, now owned by Pauline, will host her sister's wedding. Pauline will be marrying Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed schlub who occupies his time writing letters to the editor. Needless to say, he is easy pickings for Margot's withering opinions.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach's last film, the divorce dark comedy THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, depicted domestic fallout in painstaking detail, but MARGOT AT THE WEDDING takes psychological warfare and familial hostility to a higher level. The film portrays a deeply dysfunctional and unsympathetic lot who spit darts at each other as naturally as breathing. They do so in the name of honesty and openness, which makes them blameless in their eyes.

Baumbach remains skilled as ever with well-turned lines and stinging humor. If anything, the two years between films gave him time to sharpen his knives so the jokes would cut with greater precision. The laughs hurt, but one has to appreciate the artistry in such wicked wit.

Yet only so much nastiness can be endured without greater insight into the human condition, or at least these characters. We would flee from these people in everyday interactions. Being stuck with them for an hour and a half can be downright unbearable.

As a kind of theater of cruelty, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is unarguably successful; however, after choking on laughs for a period, the question becomes whether Baumbach has anything to deliver beyond his misanthropic floggings. Little introduction to Margot and the others is needed to see them for the hateful people they are, but what is the point of subjecting us to this caustic environment if there isn't a larger idea behind observing it?

The ugliness extends to the visual palette. The film has the appearance of being shot through a polarized lens. Cinematographer Harris Savides gives an oppressive darkness to the images, a choice in line with the murky emotions clouding the air. The decision is artistically defensible, but it comes at the expense of leaving the already weary viewer feeling even gloomier. If it's possible to get seasonal affective disorder from a movie, this might be the one.

Ultimately, the matter of degree is what trips up Baumbach in MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. The problem is not that the characters are unlikable or totally unfamiliar. Indeed, their harshness and lack of generosity may be all too closely recognized, albeit in smaller doses. No, the trouble is that he has drawn caricatures incapable of self-editing and possessing shreds of decency that we would expect to find in non-sociopaths.

Grade: C+