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Rating: The man (or men) tasked with Italianizing the titles of foreign films should resign, reflect, and redeem themselves. Why not leave "Greenberg," the original title, which literally explains everything about this film? They must have just read the plot, or worse, glanced at the poster. Why add that useless and misleading "stravagante mondo" (extravagant world)? Ah yes, there's Ben Stiller, so it must be a comedy. The viewer looking for easy laughs, sitting and eating popcorn while wondering why a film with Ben Stiller is playing there, in a semi-hidden cinema and not in a 3D theater, won’t take long to leave during the interval, disappointed, bewildered, and irritated for wasting their money on that ticket.
Los Angeles. Florence, a nanny-assistant for a wealthy family (the Greenbergs) in her twenties, with a precarious and incomplete life; Roger, the brother of the family man, in his forties, a maladjusted former musician (actually, ex-everything) tasked with house-sitting while recovering from a nervous breakdown. Both searching for something that, of course, never arrives. They find and part from each other, build barriers that they break down only to reunite. The story, despite following the typical guidelines of a comedy, is destined from the start to resolve in disheartening indeterminacy, in the coldest stasis; little or nothing changes in the lives of two characters acting in a context, that of American suburbia, no less spectral than their condition.
Specifically, nothing seems to change for Roger, a ghost alienated from the world around him, in a full existential crisis. The protagonist is depicted deeply and impeccably: the extravagant world spoken of is not simply an alternate reality he retreats into (we’ve seen this elsewhere), but an intricate mosaic of behaviors (tics, mood swings) that can be summarized as a barrier imposed against society. Thus, wrong choices find justification.
The compulsively written protest letters sent everywhere reflect his total inadequacy in facing a world he rejects; attending teenage parties reveals his identity crisis; wanting to know what others think of him reveals a paranoid-obsessive complex; and above all, Florence, the only support and hypothetical escape route, who is consistently pushed away with the excuse of an unbridgeable age gap (does she remind him of his never-lived youth?).
The "adapted" acquaintances (not lacking a delicious taste of bourgeois mediocrity) aggravate the situation: rather than approaching their status, Roger would prefer others to lower themselves to his level ("I'm trying to do nothing"); just as when he pushes his best friend to leave his wife to form an unlikely reunion.
The location, Los Angeles, is not chosen by chance: it is the place of fiction par excellence. Everything revolves around the same square kilometer of identical little houses, driving back and forth to the same places, homes, parties.
In Greenberg, there is a systematic use of symbolism. The surreal party where Florence finds herself, in the middle of an artificial forest; a puppet held up only by the wind; a mysterious drowned animal in a pool. There is an affinity of the author with a European spirit, closer to auteur cinema than to faux indie Sundance-style aspirations.
Ben Stiller here is dealing with his most challenging role, only in Wes Anderson’s "The Royal Tenenbaums" have we seen him outside the usual mask of the awkward Jewish character (Noah Baumbach himself wrote with Anderson), and here too, both the writing and the acting are the core of the film. The same applies to the newcomer Greta Gerwig, not exactly a beauty icon and for this even more genuine and natural.
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