“Funky ass shit going down in the city”
Figuring out why I like Greenberg so much as it all just poured out of me (which I hope doesn’t come out as all being obvious):
1) The opening shot zooming in on Florence hiking, no music, and then BOOM cut to Steve Miller Band “Jet Airliner” while Florence drives around LA. I’m listening to “Jet Airliner” while I write this and I’m getting chills. ”Goodbye to all my friends at home/Goodbye to people I’ve trusted” and “You know you got to go through to hell to get to heaven” are two key lines in this song as it relates to Greenberg. The song distills a positive energy of moving forward (melody, tempo) while the lyrics also point to feeling stationary and wanting to move away from something. The characters in Greenberg are lost and they’re having trouble moving forward to the next phase in their life though they know they must, and want too. I can relate to it big time. ”My heart keeps on moving backwards as I get on that 707”. The past is in albatross that you have to move away from but that isn’t easy. Is the past a definition of who you are?
2) Ivan: Youth is wasted on the young.
Greenberg: I’d go further. I’d go: “Life is wasted on people.”
It’s hard being a person. You try to be good, you try to be this, you try to be that. One time my mom and I were having an argument and I said, “But it’s all so hard! I have trouble living life sometimes!” and she said back “It’s like that for everyone!!” Life is wasted on people because it is impossible for a person to enjoy the gift of life; to simply revel in the fact that they chanced into becoming a conscious being. People are flawed and Greenberg is flawed. But so is everyone else around him. No one in this movie is perfect. There’s a moment when Ivan says something like, “You don’t understand living a life you didn’t plan on!” and Greenberg screams back at him “Of course I do! What the FUCK do you think I’m doing now?” Greenberg isn’t perfect but neither is anyone else in this film. It is this struggle between the characters to understand one another, to accept each other’s flaws and each other’s problems and each other’s misconceptions about the world, themselves, and how they are perceived, that propels all the drama in the film just like it does in life.
3) The importance music plays in this film speaks to me as a music fanatic. I encounter people who don’t understand the role music plays in my life - and they certainly have something in their life that I don’t understand that fulfills a similar role in theirs. So there’s an equivalent for everyone, but for me, in this film, it’s the music stuff that sticks out, as I believe Noah Baumbach intended.
Greenberg makes Florence a mix tape immediately after meeting her; he checks out her CDs in her car; he goes to see her sing; he even has a little trouble turning down the music in the car while Florence is on her way to her abortion. He fucking hates when they turn Duran Duran off! “Dude - youngster - that’s fucking perfect coke music! Dont you get it?” he thinks. Again, it’s about trying to connect with others and not understanding what others want and prefer as opposed to your own tastes and feelings.
Throughout Greenberg, Greenberg wears a Steve Winwood t-shirt; a cover of the album “Back In The High Life,” which features the song “Back In the High Life Again”. That’s what the characters want. The past. To get back in the high life again. And again, it’s about the struggle trying to get to the high life while moving away from the past to the new phases, but man, it’s hard. The song, much like “Jet Airliner,” mixes hope with this nostalgic melancholy that defines a lot of this film.
4) So when Greenberg leaves his voicemail for Florence and then the movie ends with her saying to him about the voicemail, “This is you,” I can’t help but think that the message of the movie is this: People are different and we’ve all got to do our best to see eye to eye while realizing that that’s near impossible to do. Life is hard and people are different! Florence realizes this more than the other characters and because of this I think Greenberg realizes he is lucky to have met her. Throughout the film he tries to do nothing, but with Florence’s influence he sees that nothing is not an answer. So then he decides to go nuts and travel impulsively to Australia! No, not that answer either. But then what? What do we do with our lives? Which decisions are meaningful and correct?
5) We live in the moments. And in these moments we can only do our best. We will err constantly, but we will also learn and move forward. We can’t change our lives with a single decision. It’s all flawed and imperfect and everyone will not always be happy. There are casualties. Our past will haunt us. But Noah Baumbach has made a film that is close to life and embraces this. The focal point in the film is the relationship between Greenberg and others - specifically Florence. By the film’s end Greenberg has learned through his interactions with others and starts to arrive at the only valuable realization a human can have: We live, we die, and in the middle there’s a bunch of shit. And that bunch of shit is very similar to everyone else’s.
Greenberg is having a hard time living his own life, but at film’s end he is starting to see that his life is no different than anyone else’s. Everyone’s struggling in some way so he’s just gotta face his own problems and accept who he is. And by accepting who he is he will understand that you’ve got to go easy on yourself because no one lives a perfect life.
Thanks to Dean for inspiring me to go apeshit and think and write about a flick I dig a whole lot!
What I Watched: Greenberg
I like this movie more and more every time I watch it. It’s a very wry, subtle look at some very flawed humans floundering around with each other. I especially like it because after the second time watching it I realized that it’s not actually about the title character Greenberg, but that it’s really about Greta Gerwig’s character Florence who is one of the more realistic, relatable characters I’ve seen on film in a long time.
