Baumbach

Okay, I am now officially very intensely waiting for The Squid and the Whale. While waiting, I got thinking about Noah Baumbach’s earlier films, and thought I ought to write something about them here. Matt Feeney beat me to it, at Slate, so I’ll just point you to him. That said, he doesn’t mention Highball, a strange little film about a cocktail party, which seems like a throwaway, except for some great dialogue and some glorious scene-stealing by Peter Bogdanovich, who keeps doing impersonations of various filmmakers and actors.

The best thing in both of Baumbach’s first two movies–despite the always brutally funny Chris Eigemann–is the strangely sincere earnest silliness of Carlos Jacott. But Feeney nails how good Jacott is, so, again, I’ll cop out and let his piece stand alone.

One small bit of dialogue, though, spoken by Baumbach and his brother in Kicking and Screaming, to the hero. They pester the protagonist about which animals he’d fuck, basically haranguing him into choosing an animal just to shut them up. But when he says, exasperatedly, “Cow,” they look bitter and hostile and call him “Cowfucker” for the rest of the movie. That, my friends, is comedy. Even the Hungarian will have to admit that.

32 thoughts on “Baumbach”

  2. i don’t remember any cow fucking related conversation in “kicking and screaming”. wait, i saw the will ferrell/mike ditka one. i actually thought i’d seen this one but it turns out i was thinking of “walking and talking”. apparently there was a time when indie filmmakers made a lot of films with two verbs connected with a conjunction in the title. your descriptions intrigue me but since it is only on vhs i will not be able to see this.

  3. Arnab – I misspelled the word “two” in my reply.

    I only noticed now that I’m home from my job proof-reading at a newspaper and drunk.

    please fix it for me.

    {PLEASE!}

  4. It’s even better dialogue than I remember:

    Guy 1 “Would you rather fuck a cow, or lose your mother?”

    Guy 2 “What? I don’t know.”

    Gal “Answer the question!”

    Guy 2 “okay… fuck a cow, I guess.”

    Guy 1 “Cowfucker”

  5. Though Reynolds is “officially very intensely waiting to see The Squid and the Whale” I actually saw the film yesterday (Mike, I officially very intensely wanted to call you to go with me but I’m not sure you live in Minnesota any longer). Anyway, I found the film to be odd–fine work but somewhat hermetically sealed and a bit precious (for example, the divorcing parents both have PhDs in literature but after their separation whey-faced, 12-year-old Frank starts humping his school library shelves and spreading his ejaculate on the books . . . hmmm). Mostly, I found the characters extremely difficult to like (except for sad old Frank who is the film’s true enigma) even while I admired the acting and the writing. And though funny it is a very painful comedy to watch (I cringed for the characters far more than I laughed at or with them). I probably would be more enthusiastic if I had discovered The Squid and the Whale as a short story in The New Yorker but as a film, I felt an uneasy tug between intense personal recollection and an aesthetic remove that kept all the psychodrama carefully contained as if to be observed from behind a glass door. Nevertheless, the film is chock full of contradictions and I encourage people to see it (I’ll probably enjoy it much more on DVD in three months as the hype had me primed for a slightly different experience).

  6. Despite quite good performances all around, I was disappointed by Squid and the Whale, and can’t recommend it. In fact, after the first 45 minutes, I realized I didn’t care anything about these characters, their story didn’t intrigue me, and I didn’t feel any desire to know what happened to them next. I wanted to just stop wawtching. I stuck it out though, and the second half was a better, though it may have been just the manic activity that provided enough caffeine to get me through it.

    Since seeing this, I’ve been trying to pinpoint where it went wrong for me, because this is usually the kind of film I enjoy. The actors ARE really good in it, and I have liked Baumbach’s previous films. The writing itself is not bad. My lack of interest probably comes from a weak plot; one we’ve seen (and read) a hundred times before. Resentment, divorce, kids caught in the middle who act out their frustrations in dumb confused ways. Blah blah blah. Insert neurosis and insecurity here. Considering it’s such a well-worn theme, there needed to be something more to the story to pull me in. On one hand I admire that he didn’t go for something outlandish or overly stylized, as Wes Anderson might have, but I love the outlandish and stylized Anderson, and if you strip his stuff down to the bones, then I’d be less happy with that too.

    Maybe it’s that I have never lived in New York, never had parents who were writers, and that they never got divorced (I did however once try to pass a Pink Floyd song off as my own – but only to a girl I was trying to end it with anyway), but I know that’s not the problem at all. I like plenty of New York, literary, divorced, bearded, elite, white-family movies.

    For specific annoyances I’ll say this: five minutes in therapy does not a breakthrough make, and the subject of the film’s title is weak. Mercifully, the film is short.

  7. That is a detail I just don’t get. Pink Floyd’s The Wall was huge. To imagine that a wealthy (intellectually if not economically) white boy from Park Slope could get away with passing “Hey You” off as his own while also winning the talent show . . . well, that strikes me as hard to digest (and it pulled me out of the movie). Sure The Wall came out in 1979 (I was working in a record store at the time and played the damn thing daily much to the chagrin of my stoned customers and co-workers), but the Alan Parker film was released in 1982 or 83 (and continued to live in on at midnight showings at rep houses).

  8. You’re forcing me to remember my high school days, Jeff. And that is badbadbad.

    I agree with you that in an almost entirely believable movie, that plot device also struck me as too absurd to be there. But then, I realized I had done something almost exactly the same – and with the same damn album to boot. It’s too odd of a scene to be entirely fictional I think. I’d guess Baumbach really did do this.

    So maybe this will give you some indication of what Baumbach was trying to do. If only because it’s what I was trying to do.

    I didn’t perform a song from The Wall: I wrote out the lyrics in a rambling letter to a girl I was dating in high school – probably my first or second real girlfriend. I didn’t choose that song, though I forget which one I used. Here’s another kicker: She GAVE me the album as a bday or xmas present. Then I stole the lyrics, and used them in the letter…

    As was my M.O. with most relationships up until marriage, the moment I thought I had the girl, I’d sabotage everything. I was daring her to catch me in such a ridiculous ploy as passing off Roger Waters’ lyrics as my own thoughts, knowing it would lead to a scene and a break-up, but at least one I was instigating, and thus somewhat controlling.

    So maybe Walt in the Squid and Whale wasn’t so oblivious to the possibility of getting caught, or looking down so much on his peers as to believe they wouldn’t know about “The Wall”… Maybe it was just his way of instigating his own crisis, rather than getting sideswiped by events he never saw coming (the divorce, the affairs) as keeps happening to him in the movie.

    At least when he’s told he has to give the money back and everyone knows he plagiarized, he KNEW it was coming, he had control over it.

    I was of course confronted by girlfriend, “Did you write this?” and flat out lied: “Yes. Yes I did.” Which mercifully helped speed the end of the relationship for reasons having to do with me being stupid and lying as opposed to her breaking up with me b/c of who I was.

    This is however probably one of the least baffling things I did looking back on a mostly embarrassing, selfish and rather silly adolescence.

  9. I once had a girlfriend. I told her I wrote “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and she dumped me! Maybe I shoulda tried “Belsen was a Gas?”

  10. I once had a girlfriend. I told her I wrote “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and she dumped me! Maybe I shoulda tried “Belsen was a Gas?”

  11. I didn’t post it twice. the blog betrayed me, and it called me “cowboy” which is worse than Cleve Stevens calling me “chief” and “boss.”

    As for The Wall, in 1980 I listened to it all the time thinking it was “deep”—then I saw the movie and realized it was bullshit. also, thank god, for the clash and elvis costello who rescued me.

  12. I’m not even sure one can honestly describe their teens and early-twenties as a period of adolescence unless it was indeed full of silly, embarassing and selfish acts (those less fortunate are simply required to grow up). The Clash and Elvis Costello rescued me as well (and The Talking Heads). Unfortunately, they rescued me from Fleetwood Mac and the Urban Cowboy soundtrack not The Wall (I was already committed to these bands before Roger Waters’ magnum opus). Maybe it has something to do with teenage alienation, but The Wall spoke loudly to me even as I was professing The Specials, The Pretenders and their ilk as the second coming. I do think, however, that Walt may have been asking to get caught . . . that the song was primarily performed to see if he could get away with such plagiarism in a home where plagiarism actually mattered. Still, the film doesn’t seem to know where it stands on this plot point and while it may seem trite to pick this detail apart, it does play a significant role in the dramatic action.

  13. Well, finally saw this, and very glad I did. For the record, I too do not have writer parents, NYC hipster cred, nor a divorce in my background. And yet I intensely identified with every one of the characters–they so brutally, ineffectively deal with their emotional needs, they cover up self-loathing with passionate judgments of others, they never miss an opportunity to drag someone close down to their emotional state. I felt like every bad thing I’d ever done was being rediscovered in some raw, new form. (Except for the masturbating at school. I never did that, except in the writing center house, and who didn’t masturbate there?)

    I agree–the therapy was condensed. The museum’s final shot and metaphor overdetermined. The film did feel like a short story, condensed, all fat honed away. And “Hey You” was a strangely public bit of plagiarism.

    But of course he steals Floyd–it’s not just about getting caught, it’s the song itself. Waters is ridiculously trite and overwrought if you pay any attention to what he’s saying … yet somehow the music affects you, it resonates at that pure adolescent pitch of emotions. “I felt like I could have written it,” Walt says, and I think Baumbach tips his hat here–he knows it’s no new story, it’s rehearsing a familiar set of events, its pains are not even particularly deserving of pity… yet, you know. Hey You. (When Frank has his nights alone at home, the music from “Risky Business” plays on the soundtrack. Baumbach is attentive to his influences.)

    What I think is superlative here, besides the uniformly great performances (and especially the kid Frank, Owen Kline), is the writing. Scenes collapse into four lines of dialogue three jarring shifts of tone or emotion; so much happens so economically. In a season of 2- to 3-hour kitchen-sink film experiences, it’s a pleasure to see something so razor-sharp.

    And, oh yeah, goddamn it’s funny.

  14. sorry, mike, but this is not a funny movie. this is such a painful movie. i do have divorce in my background, and a little bit of educational snobbishness, and, also, some variety of parent-inflicted psychological torture. but i do not have NYC, so maybe i should stop here (i won’t).

    i didn’t particularly like this movie (the way i generally determine that is by deciding whether and to whom i’d recommend it: the answers are, no, no one), but it sure hit home. it’s a nice little bit of autobiography that does a decent job at turning itself into art — as mike said, measured, unindulgent, well done. that’s just about as much as you can ask of autobiographical stories of teenagers growing up in dysfunctional families in the 80s or 70s. i hope the 90s and 00s will give us more interesting fucked-up-parents-with-sinking-kids dramas, and better hair-dos.

    which one of the two kids do you think is the autobiographical “i”?

  15. The older kid is the Noah-B stand-in. I find anything that happens to other people funny. If it happens to me it’s tragic. (I steal from the best.) Funny is probably a silly thing to argue about (we’d go ’round in circles) but I’d still say the film’s comic in its impulses….

    As far as f-u-p-w-s-k films, this is a long sight better than Shoot the Moon. I like how it sticks to the kids’ point of view. Richard E. Grant’s new movie (Wah Wah) while not getting the strongest reviews has been not-unfavorably compared to Squid.

  18. Baumbach’s first film, Kicking and Screaming, just came out in a Criterion edition. Don’t know about extras or anything, but the film itself is quite good.

  19. I almost rented that yesterday. I do like the film, but it seems a little light for Criterion treatment. It looked like they were trying to give it that Wes Anderson modern-master sheen. Instead I got Pollack’s Sketches of Gehry doc, which I’ve not finished yet. I like it, but don’t think it’s a particularly good film itself, but photographing (some of) Gehry’s buildings at least gives you a great subject.

  21. what exactly prompted me to add kicking and screaming to my netflix queue? what led me to think i could, i don’t say like, but at least tolerate this piece of mindless bored-boys americana? please somebody explain this to me.

    note to self: do not watch any other baumbach films.

  22. we watched this a few nights ago as well. we both enjoyed it well enough, but yes, it is as though women don’t exist in this film except as objects of desire or as the limits of male bonding. there is some gesturing towards self-conscious critique of this in the film but not enough for it to come together. never having been good at male bonding i couldn’t relate to most of it.

    gio, i thought the squid and the whale was much better and not as susceptible to this critique.

    also: mike remembers the cowfucker thing all wrong. and in a dead giveaway, forgets that parker posey is also in on it.

  24. it wasn’t the absence of women that put me off it (neither simon nor i could get past the half hour mark so i can’t really say i have any grasp of this film’s gender politics). it’s just that these movies about disaffected american males are spoken in a language i do not know. but that’s not true either. i started seeing he died with a falafel in his hands and it was exactly the same thing, though the movie is not american. is there any tradition other than the anglo-aussie-american in which loser boys doing absolutely nothing except being loserish is a fit cinematographical subject?

  25. Yeah. It’s critiqued but visible in Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, and younger and less critiqued in Eimbcke’s Duck Season. You could make a case for a generic family resemblance in Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Maclean’s Jesus’ Son. But maybe I’m stretching beyond the limits you’ve defined. We could blame a lot on Kerouac, or give Jim Jarmusch a kick for his earlier films, but Goethe’s young Werther seems equally culpable for the archetypal tale of young male navel-gazing.

    I’d watch a group of anyone–young well-off American boys, older well-off Los Angeleno women, African-American men on a bus, striking coal miners, Scottish heroin addicts–if the movie engaged me on the community’s own terms (however limited), with wit and a modicum of style.

  27. You didn’t get far enough into Kicking to see the book club, did you?

    So, what about My Dinner With Andre or Before Sunrise–nothing but two people talking? (No strikes, drugs limited to wine or coffee, and no action but for endless chatter?)

  29. i don’t know if mr. jealousy is available on dvd but it is available from cinemax ondemand, which we have thanks to some introductory charter package which we will forget to change when the offer expires and which we’ll then pay for in spades, and i watched it tonight. very, very good. much better than kicking and screaming, in my opinion, and perhaps even better than the squid and the whale. gio, you should give this a try if you can find it. it is not as specifically (liberal arts male) american as kicking and screaming nor as wrenching as the squid and the whale, and funnier and, for me, more emotionally resonant than either.

  31. The best thing about Greenberg, lapping even the very good Rhys Ifans, is Greta Gerwig. Playing Florence, the personal assistant to the successful brother Greenberg, she is a bit scattered, prone to subordinate everything–even her own desire–to the needs of others around her, and perhaps (if distilled down to character traits away from the performance) a doormat: seemingly there simply to love the scoundrel brother Greenberg (Ben Stiller), to put up with his narcissistic, alienated, neurotic, enraged needs and (eventually, as these things go) to help him be a better man.

    But Gerwig does two things which complicate, even unravel and recompose, this cliche. 1, she is utterly invested in the character’s general pleasure in the world. The film’s credits run alongside her face as she drives, or adjacent to her running errands–and she’s so composed, so interested in the world around her. Not “innocent,” nor desperate or needy — in those moments the foundation is laid, and Gerwig always builds each scene up from that ground, so that we see a character who is making some poor choices and is getting hurt but is not lost, is not some naif, is not a prop serving the male protagonist. She’s the displaced center of the film: it’s about her growing up (as much as, or at least more interestingly than, him).

    2, she’s shameless, she’s unguarded. Her character is described as a little large, and especially up against the thin, tiny Stiller, she isn’t a typical ingenue. She’s occasionally naked; she’s filmed in one scene in unflattering pantyhose over panties, dancing awkwardly about, drunk. But there’s no pity or spectacle of grotesquerie here. She (and director Baumbach) make Florence, however flawed and foolish in many ways, at home in the world. (At one point, haplessly trying to make her feel better, Greenberg says “You’re of value.” She casually dismisses this–“Of course I am. Why would you need to say that?”–and this is key to the film’s key structural conceit: take the now-familiar Apatow plot and rid it of its romanticism. Gerwig is the best thing about the film, and it is one of my favorite performances so far this year.

    The second-best thing is that conceit. Another tattered boy-man, lost in him self, losing his self, comes upon an old male friend and a new female to desire and evolves…. sort of. Maybe. Greenberg is never particularly funny in his boyishness–or at least he’s not in charge of his wit, more an object to be laughed at (by a group of younger people he engages with at a party, late in the film), and often just embarrassingly angry, off-putting, stiff, sour, humorless. And he doesn’t really seem to learn anything, and he doesn’t seem to find him self or a way to be. The movie ends before a big emotional moment, and it’s a nice touch–in keeping with its deconstruction of that typical Hollywood celebration of boymen.

    I liked the film, but it fails to be as good as it might be, or as good as Gerwig is. This is in part the constraints of its characters and focus — so narrowly attendant on Greenberg and just a couple of others, the film hasn’t much room for any kind of social commentary or greater complexity of characterization (a la Ashby or Altman, who are both referenced by Baumbach in interviews). And Stiller is… well, he’s fine — his performance is tic-less, not his normal hyperkinetic neurotic but a guy who is really not fun to watch. It’s very internal, very tightly-controlled, very constipated. And yet–blame Stiller, or Baumbach?–this is another kind of limitation. Greenberg is relentlessly shallow: there aren’t pools of complex personality to wade about it, no tragedy, hell not even much in the way of deep Rage or Disaffection. He’s just kind of a needy, shallow prick. I find that interesting but not terribly engrossing; I kept thinking, as we watched, how Chris Eigemann might have played this part…and what complexities someone might have been able to investigate, if not saddled with the star baggage Stiller carries.

    Not bad–and Gerwig is great–so I recommend.

  32. Harris Savides is great too (Gerwig should credit him with an assist)! I liked this film better than you, though I agree with you about Greenberg’s lack of rage or tragedy or disaffection . . . but I think those tropes are also traps of a kind. I liked that he wasn’t fun to watch; that he made you cringe. His family dynamic is hinted at during telephone conversations with his even shallower, prickier brother, and you get the sense that there is a lot more there but Baumbach doesn’t feel the need to spell/spill it out. Great scene with Ifans at the college kids’ party.

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