GREENBERG Trailer

And writer/director Noah Baumbach is back! Well, he helped pen the adapted screenplay of Fantastic Mr. Fox but this Baumbach’s return as a director since The Squid And The Whale (2005) which was excellent and smart in my book, Jeff Daniels should’ve been nominated for his performance, and the not so great Margot At The Wedding (2007) starring Jack Black and Nicole Kidman.
With GREENBERG, Ben Stiller stars as a man who chooses to do nothing for a while and is ok with it. We’re going to relearn Baumbah’s sense of humor and possibly understand the lesson behind the story but it’s refreshing to encounter a character who doesn’t seem to worry about love and life at all, or does he? And this could be Stiller’s actual decent performance in a long time, one that doesn’t require him to get chased by a skeletal dinosaur or pissed off by a mariachi band. Watch the trailer after this jump…

Meet Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller): a dysfunctional 40-year-old at a crossroads in his life. Roger wants to “do nothing” for a while, so he agrees to housesit for his younger and more successful brother, giving him a free place to stay in L.A. While in town, he tries to reconnect with his old friends and band mates but times have changed, and old friends aren’t necessarily still best friends. Greenberg starts spending time with his brother’s personal assistant Florence (Great Gerwig), an aspiring singer and herself something of a lost soul too. During a series of embarrassingly awkward romantic encounters, we sense that perhaps even someone as irascible as Greenberg may have found somebody who is prepared to appreciate him for himself – if he would only stop critiquing Florence’s techniques in bed. Over the course of several weeks, we watch an uncertain and wonderfully vulnerable courtship play out, and learn how funny, and terribly unpredictable, love in the modern world can be.

GREENBERG opens limited March 12th, 2010