The Essentials: The Films Of Noah Baumbach

Here’s one true thing you can say about Noah Baumbach: with just nine directorial features under his belt, it’s remarkable that his career divides so neatly into clearly demarcated, diverse sections. But here’s another true thing you can say about Noah Baumbach: with all of nine directorial features under his belt, it’s remarkable how consistent, and consistently recognizable, his output is — his films are unmistakably his. This ostensible contradiction is one of the things that makes looking back over Baumbach’s filmography — prompted by this week’s release of his latest filmMistress America” — such a rewarding experience. Not only is he a filmmaker with a manageable, contained and thematically consistent filmography, but he has approached his recurrent themes from different angles, in different registers and with different effects.

Part of this is probably because Baumbach’s output is remarkably personal (the temptation to read it as directly autobiographical is often overwhelming), so it has changed as he has changed. Appropriately, for a filmmaker who has made “hyper-keen awareness of one’s lifestage” a key component of most of his characters and all of his plots, Baumbach has always dealt in growing pains —of growing up and then of growing old. And he has done so on occasion with such a keen, almost cruel eye for the pettiness, pretension and self-delusion that accompanies these processes that he mines acute, broad-based truths from relatively rarefied milieus; Baumbach’s characters are overwhelmingly white, college-educated East Coast-ers, smart enough to know that their privilege gives them little right to the angst they feel, but dumb enough to feel it anyway.

Mistress AmericaAccordingly, his first three films feature twentysomethings marooned in their post-college years, realizing that converting their youthful potential into an actual career, a family life, or a long-term relationship may not be so easy after all. Then came a long hiatus (during which his disowned, failed experiment “Highball” got a belated release), after which he returned with the excoriating “The Squid and the Whale,” which ushered in a sorta-trilogy of caustic tragicomedies. But after “Greenberg,” Baumbach pivoted once more, finding a looseness and a joy, especially in his creative partnership with Greta Gerwig, that suggests a surprisingly upbeat acceptance of the consolations of growing older and the odd nobility of maybe not having everything figured out.

If he sticks to the three-film rhythm, we’re due for another left turn soon, but honestly, we’d be happy if Baumbach stayed in this groove for a while longer. Here’s our rundown of the directorial features that mark Noah Baumbach’s journey toward this week’s lovely, lively “Mistress America.”

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“Kicking and Screaming” (1995)
While it still feels very much conceived in the shadow of filmmaker Whit Stillman, who also made thoughtful, erudite comedies about young people in the city trying to figure it all out, Noah Baumbach’s formal debut “Kicking and Screaming” still feels as oddly relevant today as it did twenty years ago. It’s a snappy, melancholy comedy about blazer-wearing college kids who aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves the summer after they graduate (they’re still in town because, after all, the neighborhood bar is right across the street). Like many of the director’s other films, “Kicking and Screaming” is about a period of limbo: that awkward transition after school ends, where you’ve spent so much time discussing art, literature, and history that you’ve forgotten how to function in the real world. It’s also a touching look at growing up that managed to plant thematic seeds that would end up blossoming in future Baumbach endeavors (delayed maturity, creative stasis, the tenuousness of friendship and fractured family bonds). “Kicking and Screaming” also stands as perhaps the director’s outright funniest movie, packed with snappily quotable one-liners. The story follows a group of friends: Grover (Josh Hamilton) is shell-shocked that his girlfriend is leaving him to study in Prague; the acerbic Max (Chris Eigeman in a career-best performance) is a 50-year old misanthrope in the body of a 20-something undergrad; Otis (Carlos Jacott) works a dreary job at a video rental store and can’t bring himself to actually read for his book club; and bartender Chet (Eric Stoltz), for whom alcohol is a literal philosophy. The movie gets off to a somewhat sluggish start, at a party scene that’s overstuffed with arch dialogue and almost as many pop-culture allusions as a Seth MacFarlane show, but the underlying humanism in Baumbach’s worldview ultimately wins out, and we actually come to care about this quippy group of chums and their endlessly referential, often very amusing conversations. It’s an interesting film to go back and visit after you’ve familiarized yourself with Baumbach’s later work, mostly because the motifs he’s consistently mulled over through the years are fully present here and it’s fascinating to see how his directorial style has evolved since his visually modest debut. Baumbach himself, as was his wont in his first films, also has a brief cameo, as does his father Jonathan (as an English professor). [B+]

Mr Jealousy
“Mr Jealousy” (1997)
Often called “Noah Baumbach’s worst film,” “Mr Jealousy” may just about fit that bill (at least for anyone who hasn’t seen “Highball“) but that doesn’t make it bad bad. In fact, shorn of any expectations of greatness and looked on as an artifact of the late-90s East Coast indie scene, “Mr Jealousy” plays well: an amiable romantic comedy whose main strength is its charm, and whose main flaw is that it’s just charm. Stylistically it feels like a supergroup — Whit Stillman tackling a brazenly mid-period Woody Allen plot embellished with New Wave flourishes (iris-in transitions; laconic omniscient voiceover). But thematically, it’s as personal as any of Baumbach’s films, with his recurrent preoccupation with lifestage-related paralysis and fear of creative impotence as well as his tendency toward intense self-analysis forming the impetus of the plot. But while there are some genuine insights and well-pitched performances (Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra are appealing as the central pair, but Carlos Jacott and Chris Eigeman steal the film in supporting roles), the prickly dialogue that marked out “Kicking and Screaming” only spikes intermittently, and so the film overall goes down just a little too easily, a little too unremarkably. Embarking on a new relationship with unconvincingly “clumsy” but forthright and sexually experienced Ramona (Sciorra), aspiring writer Lester (Stoltz) resolves not to let his jealousy of her former boyfriends scupper the romance. But upon encountering one of those exes, successful writer Dashiell (Eigeman), Lester’s worse nature takes over and he follows him to his therapy group, led by Dr. Poke (Peter Bogdanovich). Of course, Lester joins the group, under the pseudonym of his best friend Vince (Jacott) who, in perhaps the Woody Allen-est twist of all, feeds Lester his real angst so that he also gets free therapy-by-proxy. The convolutions of this doomed plot fairly soon overwhelm any actual depth, but Baumbach has affection for his characters, so while “Mr Jealousy” does inevitably feel a bit ordinary, there are still some nice touches. Ramona is an unusually independent object of affection; Dashiell a very sympathetic “villain,” and Vince a charming sidekick. The main reason, though, if not the worst, that it is definitely among the least of Baumbach’s movies, is that Lester’s life lesson is not particularly hard-learned: it’s breezy and low-stakes, and nothing in “Mr Jealousy” cuts too deep. [B-]