"Greenberg" In The New Yorker

David Denby:

This is tricky, ambiguous material, seemingly better fitted to a short literary novel than to a movie, and it could have gone wrong in a hundred ways, yet Baumbach handles it with great assurance. In long scenes between Greenberg and Marr, he says something amusing and mean, and she, because she’s either too kind or too surprised, doesn’t come back at him. The characters can’t get any kind of rhythm going, but the actors hold the bumpy conversations in tension. The scenes don’t lose their pace or their shape; they sustain a ruffled, poignant mood.

...Greta Gerwig has acted in mumblecore features, and she has the relaxation and the changeableness of an actress who has done improvisation on camera. Her speech is slightly slurpy, and she can look Raggedy Ann messy one moment, then radiantly beautiful the next. She’s convincing as a young woman who doesn’t quite know who she is, and as Marr her instinctive goodness slowly begins to work on Stiller’s Greenberg, whose sheer perversity has its own fascination.