Greenberg

With Greenberg, I find myself questioning not its execution but its project, its impetus and its worth. Technically, I don’t find much to complain about in the film. Performances range from effective to good (it’s not really the kind of film that permits acting of either extreme), the writing is on point, it is shot well but not distractingly, etc, etc. It achieved what it was aiming for; the space in between the underlying intentions and the result onscreen is remarkably small, which certainly is a kind of success worth having.

And Greenberg is not the first work to depict a misanthropic, unappealing lead (protagonist doesn’t seem like quite the word). It will not be the last, and when I say that my problems with the film stem from how much I disliked its eponymous hero, it is not to cast aspersions on choosing topics for fiction that are less than ideal, or somehow bad, ugly, or otherwise wrong. The ineffectiveness of depicting only the things we would like to see ourselves as has been proven time and again.

I cannot help but view Greenberg and his younger love interest Florence (Greta Gerwig, utterly guileless) from my own perspective, which in this case means my own age. In the simplest way, Greenberg is in this fashion a cautionary figure for me: don’t be like this. But that’s not enough to satisfy, and I don’t think it’s the whole story either. Even the most unappealing characters must be in some way sympathetic. The forms this sympathy can take run the absolute gamut, from fascination to empathy to the camaraderie of people who have nothing in common.

But Greenberg is none of these for me. He hovers infuriatingly on the edge of reasonableness and comprehension, which makes his sheer social repulsion all the more unfathomable, caught uncomfortably in between an intellectual and a visceral response. I think I resent that he is placed in the position of a character with whom we should come to find sympathy, and this resentment is driven home particularly strongly because at the core of his neuroses, his misanthropy and his cruelty, is an inability to grow up. As a young person who is just starting out in the world and looking to the future, I refuse to accept that his is viable.

And similarly, I find Florence to be a frustrating character, in part because it’s impossible to make any intellectual leeway against her. She is so carelessly likeable, so unaffected, so open and yet so vague that any criticism I am likely to make is one she would readily accept. She incarnates a certain form of the sometimes artificially balanced worldview that is so prevalent now, finding a medium and a compromise between all things. In her case, this compromise leads to a certain impotence and self-defeating quality. I get a little indignant at the possibility that she is representative of a culture that I largely buy into. I want to say that it is her, and not the culture, that led to her own affable stagnancy.

And can I? I think so, and perhaps it is a function of my perspective that this affirmation requires a rejection of its opposite. From where I stand, Greenberg is not bad, but Greenberg is, when really, it should be the other way around.

People I wouldn't expect to be superheroes

After seeing the trailer for Iron Man 2 today—which looks reasonably, if not excessively cool—and which featured, briefly, what appeared to be a Scarlett Johansson with kung fu abilities, I decided to put together a list of people (actors, mostly) that I find to be implausible in roles that involve superhero alter-egos.

So without further ado:

1. Scarlett Johansson (Iron Man 2, unless I misinterpreted the trailer). I mean, she’s seductive and all, but does she really seem like she could actually have the physical strength to beat someone up?
2. Cameron Diaz (Charlie’s Angels). Ditto the above, minus the seductive, plus a lot of ditzy. She doesn’t look like she could throw a punch without help. But on the other hand, I have an inexplicable fondness for the Charlie’s Angels movies (so sue me), so I’ll let it pass.
3. Uma Thurman (Kill Bill). Hear me out. She’s like 6 ft tall, blonde, stringy, and not without a certain deliberate awkwardness in her movements. But that’s part of what makes her so entrancing in Kill Bill, the unlikelihood of her success, and part of what renders the film so ridiculous and compelling at the same time.
4. Alicia Silverstone (Batman and Robin). Thanks to Marisa for this one. I admit I don’t really recall the details of this movie (probably for the best—didn’t this one involve the governor of California freezing people to death?), but I’m willing to include her on concept alone.
5. Ben Affleck (Daredevil). Aside from the fact that I never entirely understood the notion of a superhero whose superpower is that he’s BLIND, Ben Affleck: costumed vigilante? Yeah.
6. Jessica Alba (Fantastic Four). Actually, what I found unbelievable about her in these movies was not so much that she can turn invisible and shoot force fields, but that she was an astrophysicist.

Any others?