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.