Last night my father and I went out to a small theater in the Philadelphia suburbs to see Greenberg, the new film by Noah Baumbach. Because of the title and the lead actor, Ben Stiller, I was afraid that the film would be Jew-centric. I don’t like things that proclaim their Jewishness, not when Jews are supposed to be opening their eyes to the rest of the world. Still I went. My dad’s 84. He’s Jew-centric, it felt like an opportunity.
My antenna started quivering at the start with the introduction of the rich materialistic Greenberg family in Hollywood and their smarmily-patronizing treatment of their personal assistant, Florence, played by Greta Gerwig (in a breakout performance, but I’ll leave the film criticism of this fine film to the connoisseurs). It’s everything I hate about smug Jewish materialistic existence, I thought I was in for it. Then the film declared its values. The rich family goes off on vacation and Greenberg’s brother shows up, Ben Stiller, to housesit. Stiller’s a carpenter/musician who’s just gotten out of a mental hospital after a breakdown, and he’s avowedly non-Jewish. His mother is a gentile, he tells a friend in Hollywood, and none of his mannerisms are Jewish (a self-delusion on the character’s part).
And in that same conversation, the old friend, Beller, a former band partner now super-rich, says something scatological about someone else’s grandmother, and another character says of Beller, He plants trees in Israel.
I suddenly loved the movie. I realized that Beller is a dick—as opposed to the other former bandmate, a Brit–and one way Baumbach establishes his obtuseness for his arthouse audience is by having him plant trees in Israel. Case closed.
Later on in the film, the Stiller character, whose craziness is manifested by the countless letters he writes to merchants, air lines, pet taxi companies, and others to complain about their conduct, sends a letter to the New York Times. We just see the addressee, the New York Times, and this is odd, because every other letter he writes we hear out loud, with Stiller obsessing over the tiny thing the company did wrong. I guess his criticism of the Times is on the cutting room floor, politics being too big a leap for a movie with ambitions about psychology and manners. The reason I know it’s political is that a few scenes later Stiller opens the Times and declares, they printed my letter about Pakistan.
So it’s Pakistan? This tetchy crazy conflicted half-Jew is upset about Pakistan? Somehow I doubt it. After I drove home with my dad (who had hated it from the start, doesn’t like psychological movies), I wondered if the movie producers hadn’t interceded and made Baumbach change Palestine, which would have been psychologically appropriate for a déclassé conflicted half-Jew in the modern age, to Pakistan, just as in another era, Van Morrison’s Brown-Skinned Girl became Brown-Eyed Girl. The Israel lobby never sleeps.
