Loneliness, anger and Greenberg....

What Ben Stiller was born to act

I remember Mother Teresa telling me on her return from the West — “It’s easy to deal with the poverty of the East.

Feed a person and you give them some happiness, but the poverty of the West, which is loneliness and an inability to communicate, I don’t know how to cope with that.” At the core, Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is lonely and his inability to reach out to others makes him angry and unbearable to the people he’s trying to come to terms with.

Noah Baumbach, who makes formidable films like The Squid and the Whale about a family torn apart by a divorce with no one, not even their children to help them, is an authority on the Western mode of loneliness, isolation, anger and all the other symptoms of being alone.

Says my guru Roger Ebert, “When you’re angry with the world and yourself to the same degree, you’re running in place. It takes a great deal of energy. You lash out at people. It all takes place in your head. After a time, people give up on you.

“That’s Roger Greenberg. I never knew who Stiller was born to play, but now I do. I don’t mean he is Greenberg, but that he makes him a convincing person and not a caricature. Greenberg was once, years ago, part of a rock band on the brink of a breakthrough. He walked away from it, stranding his bandmates, and never explained why. He fled Los Angeles and became a carpenter in New York.

“He’s been struggling. There has been some sort of vague period in an institution. Now he’s returned to LA to house-sit his brother’s big home and look after the dog. He can live alone no more successfully than with others. He calls Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), his brother’s family assistant, who knows where everything is and how everything works.

And the dog knows her.

“Florence is someone we know. A bright, pleasant recent college graduate for whom the job market has no use. We see her interacting with the family of Greenberg's brother; she does all the planning for them she should be doing for herself. In a more conventional movie, Florence would be the love interest, and Greenberg would be fated to marry her. But Florence isn’t looking for a man. She just broke up. ‘I don’t want to go from just having sex to sex to sex,’ she says. ‘Who’s the third ‘sex’?’ asks Greenberg. ‘You.’ Greenberg treats her badly. When they end up having sex, and they do, it’s like their right hands don’t know what heir left hands are doing. “He has a reunion with a former bandmate, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), a calm Brit, troubled by a trial separation, happy enough to see Greenberg and help him if he can.

But Ivan is worried that Greenberg still doesn’t understand how he crushed the dreams of his bandmates. Then there’s Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who Greenberg once loved and was loved by. She has moved on in her life. She has a family.

“The important relationship is the one between Greenberg and Florence. She’s happy when she has a purpose. She wishes she had a direction in life but can be happy enough in the moment. It’s as if when Greenberg moves a little in the direction of happiness, he gets jealous because that draws attention away from his miserable uniqueness. People driven to be constantly unique can be a real pain in the ass.

“We can’t stand Greenberg. But we begin to care about him.” That’s how good Ben Stiller is.