MILK OF HUMAN VILENESS
With Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young opening this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, Hannah McGill surveys the New York director’s darkly
comic dissections of fractured relationships and self-delusion
B orn in Brooklyn to a novelist and a i lm critic, Noah Baumbach has a privileged intellectual’s squeamish loathing of privileged intellectuals: the characters in his i lms very often combine ample cerebral and creative gifts with an utter dearth of emotional intelligence. He shares some territory here with his friend Wes Anderson, whose i lms The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr Fox he co-wrote, although the Baumbach oeuvre is less whimsical, more rooted in a grim reality of human disconnectedness that sometimes – as in his recent, much-loved hipster comedy Frances Ha – blossoms into near-positivity. With his new i lm While We’re Young, starring Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts, set to open the Glasgow Film Festival, we look at the movies that have made Baumbach a director with whom the A-list want to work . . .
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (2007) The success of The Squid and the Whale clearly having motivated him to trawl for ever more troubling manifestations of human vileness, Baumbach followed it up with a comedy of an even blacker and bleaker hue. Nicole Kidman stars as a writer whose keen eye for other people’s l aws doesn’t provide her with much insight about her own; Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach’s wife at the time, is her more happily dysfunctional sister; and over a few days, everyone does everything they can to make one another unhappy until it becomes a little hard to care what becomes of any of them. Critics asked whether Baumbach’s interest in psychological conl ict risked exhausting rather than enlightening his audience.
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005) Baumbach poured long-held resentment over his parents’ divorce into this angry comedy of upper middle class manners – or the lack thereof – and got a breakout indie hit in return. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels play posh New York parents whose vast knowledge of arts and literature and loyal dependence on psychoanalysis have done nothing to curb their tendency to be seli sh horrors; Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline are the kids in the midst of it all. Though a pretty painful watch, the i lm struck a chord, counting an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay and three Golden Globe nominations among its many award nods. GREENBERG (2010) Though still invested in human failure and self-deception, Greenberg is a lighter piece than its predecessors – and arguably also a more complex and interesting one. A funnier script leavens Baumbach’s customary misanthropy, while a skilled cast create characters who are l awed but still feel redeemable. Ben Stiller brings real complexity to a role that permits none of his characteristic leading-man narcissism: that of failed musician Roger, recovering from a nervous breakdown and nursing his delusions at his brother’s fancy LA home. Providing an awkward sort of love interest is Greta Gerwig, who would become Baumbach’s romantic
18 THE LIST 5 Feb–2 Apr 2015