Focus Features

In the January 22, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a “Shouts & Murmurs” piece appeared, titled: “The Power List: My Family.” It began:

“1. MY MOTHER
Last year’s ranking: 3
Was living in my father’s shadow, but finally got it together to walk. Now she’s holding all the cards and knows how to deal them. Is seeing a nice architect and living in Park Slope. Was a graphic designer back when she met Dad but gave it up to have a family. Look for her to go back to school in 2001 and finally get that M.F.A.
Pros: A free woman after twenty-one years of marriage; don’t expect her to waste any more time.
Cons: What took her so long?”

Now consider this line of dialogue from the 2005 film, The Squid and the Whale, as spoken by Walt—the teenage son of a pair of Brooklyn bohemians going through a painful split—to his mother:

“You disgust me. You weren’t even a writer until recently. You just bailed on Dad because he’s not as successful as he used to be and hasn’t gotten the recognition he deserves.”

Both were written by the same person: Noah Baumbach—screenwriter, director, regular contributor to The New Yorker, and, famously, the son of Brooklyn intellectuals.

Baumbach’s evolution from a precocious young writer (his first humor essay to appear in The New Yorker was in November 1991—several months after he graduated from Vassar) and director of films like Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy to a mature craftsman of such raw and razor-sharp works as The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding is a study in stripping down, yanking the camera off the tripod, and aiming the lens at the wounds beneath the wit.

Kicking and Screaming

Baumbach’s first feature—Kicking and Screaming—premiered at the 1995 New York Film Festival, when he was 26. The film—about recent college grads figuring out the next phase of their lives without quite managing to move on—became a cult classic (it’s now a Criterion DVD), an intelligent dude flick that without becoming overtly political has a keen sense of class and economic dynamics. It’s also infinitely quotable.

Many of Baumbach’s films—as well as screenplays he’s co-written with Wes Anderson, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox—have featured sons at the center of their stories, each man trying to make sense of his identity as it relates to fathers who are often emotionally challenged, to say the least.

Classic Baumbach parent-child themes were already being explored in Kicking and Screaming. In one scene, Grover, the film’s lead (played to perfection by Josh Hamilton), is visited by his recently-separated father (Elliot Gould). When his dad starts describing his sex life, Grover replies:

“Dad—I’m not really ready to accept you as a human being yet. The idea of you and mom is disgusting enough, but you and another woman…”

Kicking and Screaming’s preppy characters and sharp dialogue invited comparisons to Whit Stillman’s Upper East Side classic, Metropolitan. In a 2005 interview with the A.V. Club at The Onion, Baumbach said, “Sort of the point of Kicking & Screaming, I always felt, was that college equalizes people from different economic backgrounds, and once you graduate, you're put back where you were. I think Kicking & Screaming was perceived as being more about elites than I ever intended. I understand that even people who go on scholarship to good liberal-arts schools are part of an elite in terms of America at large, but they're different from people who are living a Fitzgerald-like existence on the Upper East Side. That's a long-winded way of saying that while I really responded to the kind of ensemble feeling of Metropolitan, I was also thinking a lot about Diner, which was another great ensemble ‘friends’ comedy.”

READ MORE ▼

In the January 22, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a “Shouts & Murmurs” piece appeared, titled: “The Power List: My Family.” It began:

“1. MY MOTHER
Last year’s ranking: 3
Was living in my father’s shadow, but finally got it together to walk. Now she’s holding all the cards and knows how to deal them. Is seeing a nice architect and living in Park Slope. Was a graphic designer back when she met Dad but gave it up to have a family. Look for her to go back to school in 2001 and finally get that M.F.A.
Pros: A free woman after twenty-one years of marriage; don’t expect her to waste any more time.
Cons: What took her so long?”

Now consider this line of dialogue from the 2005 film, The Squid and the Whale, as spoken by Walt—the teenage son of a pair of Brooklyn bohemians going through a painful split—to his mother:

“You disgust me. You weren’t even a writer until recently. You just bailed on Dad because he’s not as successful as he used to be and hasn’t gotten the recognition he deserves.”

Both were written by the same person: Noah Baumbach—screenwriter, director, regular contributor to The New Yorker, and, famously, the son of Brooklyn intellectuals.

Baumbach’s evolution from a precocious young writer (his first humor essay to appear in The New Yorker was in November 1991—several months after he graduated from Vassar) and director of films like Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy to a mature craftsman of such raw and razor-sharp works as The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding is a study in stripping down, yanking the camera off the tripod, and aiming the lens at the wounds beneath the wit.

Kicking and Screaming

Baumbach’s first feature—Kicking and Screaming—premiered at the 1995 New York Film Festival, when he was 26. The film—about recent college grads figuring out the next phase of their lives without quite managing to move on—became a cult classic (it’s now a Criterion DVD), an intelligent dude flick that without becoming overtly political has a keen sense of class and economic dynamics. It’s also infinitely quotable.

Many of Baumbach’s films—as well as screenplays he’s co-written with Wes Anderson, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox—have featured sons at the center of their stories, each man trying to make sense of his identity as it relates to fathers who are often emotionally challenged, to say the least.

Classic Baumbach parent-child themes were already being explored in Kicking and Screaming. In one scene, Grover, the film’s lead (played to perfection by Josh Hamilton), is visited by his recently-separated father (Elliot Gould). When his dad starts describing his sex life, Grover replies:

“Dad—I’m not really ready to accept you as a human being yet. The idea of you and mom is disgusting enough, but you and another woman…”

Kicking and Screaming’s preppy characters and sharp dialogue invited comparisons to Whit Stillman’s Upper East Side classic, Metropolitan. In a 2005 interview with the A.V. Club at The Onion, Baumbach said, “Sort of the point of Kicking & Screaming, I always felt, was that college equalizes people from different economic backgrounds, and once you graduate, you're put back where you were. I think Kicking & Screaming was perceived as being more about elites than I ever intended. I understand that even people who go on scholarship to good liberal-arts schools are part of an elite in terms of America at large, but they're different from people who are living a Fitzgerald-like existence on the Upper East Side. That's a long-winded way of saying that while I really responded to the kind of ensemble feeling of Metropolitan, I was also thinking a lot about Diner, which was another great ensemble ‘friends’ comedy.”

Noah Baumbach with
Jennifer Jason Leigh on
the set of Greenberg

Baumbach followed up Kicking and Screaming with 1997’s Mr. Jealousy, a witty and underrated New York-set romantic comedy featuring what was quickly becoming a stable of friends and actors—Eric Stoltz, Chris Eigeman, and Carlos Jacott. Then, in a creatively impulsive move, Baumbach used the same actors to shoot a quick (six-day) feature. It didn’t turn out as planned—Baumbach has disowned the film. The movie was released by one of the film’s producers on DVD in 2000 as Highball, the direction attributed to “Ernie Fusco.”

In that same “A.V. Club” interview, Baumbach said, “The truth is, I never ‘owned’ Highball. It really was an experiment, and kind of a foolish experiment, because I didn't think about what the ramifications would be if it didn't work. But it was made with all the best intentions, which was to try and make a movie in six days, and use all the same people from Mr. Jealousy, with all their goodwill, and bring in some more people. And it was a funny script. But it was just too ambitious. We didn't have enough time, we didn't finish it, it didn't look good, it was just a whole... mess. [Laughs.] We couldn't get it done, and I had a falling out with the producer. He abandoned it, and I had no money to finish it, to go back and maybe get two more days or something. Then later, it was put out on DVD without my approval.”

A number of years passed before Noah Baumbach made another feature. After co-writing Wes Anderson’s 2004 film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Sundance 2005 saw the premiere of Baumbach’s fourth feature: The Squid and the Whale. The film marked a stylistic departure for Baumbach, and there was a lot of journalistic speculation into exactly how autobiographical the story—a near-vérité account of a Park Slope intellectual couple’s divorce and the effects it has on their two sons in the mid-’80s—was. Baumbach’s parents were critics for The Village Voice and Partisan Review (Jonathan Baumbach, a novelist, was also the former head of Brooklyn College’s creative writing program) and they divorced when Baumbach was young.

The Squid and the Whale

In a BOMB interview with novelist Jonatham Lethem, Baumbach said, “Sometimes when I think about the whole experience of this, it starts to become a joke within a joke within a joke. The film is not only inspired by my childhood and my parents’ divorce, but it was also the first script I didn’t show to my parents while I was working on it. It’s not that I wanted to protect them from anything. I mean, they’re writers, I knew they would understand, and I knew they were going to see the movie. I just wanted to keep it my own experience.”

Baumbach went on in the same interview to discuss the tonal shift in The Squid and the Whale from his previous work, saying, “The earlier films are jokier. But different things were going on in my life during the writing of The Squid and the Whale, both professionally and personally. It seems so obvious now, but it was a new idea for me to write this story from a kid’s perspective. I started making movies pretty young; I had a lot of preconceived ideas about who I was as a filmmaker and the kind of career I wanted to have that were still connected, I think, to the teenager I was rather than the person I was becoming. I discovered here who I really am as a writer and then as a director.”

Baumbach has described the influence of watching classic Europeans films by directors like Truffaut, Bergman, and Rohmer—Claire’s Knee is one of Baumbach’s favorites—on his evolving vérité style (“It was while I was watching Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart in 2000 that I had—I don’t want to say an epiphany, but I wondered, Why aren’t I writing about kids?”).

Baumbach followed up The Squid and Whale with 2007’s Margot and the Wedding, an honest and at-times emotionally wrenching story about sisters (played by Nicole Kidman and Baumbach’s real-life wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh), a would-be wedding, and an ill-fated tree. Kidman and Leigh spar throughout the film, offering some of the most lethal yet vulnerable dialogue between siblings seen on screen. The characters can be hard to like at times, vicious even, but they’re always honest, which makes them all—almost counter-intuitively—strangely appealing.

Margot at the Wedding

About The Squid and the Whale, Jonatham Lethem wrote that Baumbach understands “an incredibly simple principle, but one that seems to have been abandoned, which is that if you cast someone innately magnetic, sympathetic, human, someone with whom the audience is likely to empathize or by whom they are likely to be beguiled, then you don’t need to have them say anything likeable,” and that’s perhaps even more true about Nicole Kidman’s Margot—one of the most emotionally bullying yet fragile film characters in recent history. Margot seems perpetually on the verge of lashing out or busting into tears—a tyrant made of glass.

In a New York article about Margot at the Wedding, Jennifer Jason Leigh said, “It’s funny, but in a really scathing, brutal way. Just to see people so exposed, and the undoing that happens, the destruction that ensues. It all could happen over the course of a breakfast. It’s that way in families.”

Baumbach made two short films for Saturday Night Live in 2008 and co-wrote 2009’s Oscar-nominated Fantastic Mr. Fox. Then, in early 2010 at the Berlin Film Festival, Baumbach premiered his fifth (sixth if you count Highball) feature, Greenberg, starring Ben Stiller, Rhys Ifans, and, in a casting choice that sent minor shockwaves through the blogosphere: Generation DIY muse, Greta Gerwig.

Greenberg marks a geographic leap to the West Coast for Baumbach, long associated with New York stories. Todd McCarthy wrote in a Variety review, “Except for the opening shots, which seem specifically designed to spotlight Los Angeles at its smoggy worst, the metropolis is presented from ground level without editorializing and with a fine balance between the beauty and the blight, the ease and the hassle, the luxury and the basic, the stimulating and the banal.”

The story follows Ben Stiller’s titular character to the City of Angels, where he hopes to do “nothing for a while” after suffering a nervous breakdown in New York. He stays at his brother’s empty home and busies himself with the construction of a doghouse and the awkward fumblings of a relationship with Gerwig (who’s an assistant to the family of Greenberg’s vacationing brother).

In a web-released featurette, Baumbach describes Roger Greenberg: “There’s real vulnerability to him. And he’s trying to protect himself in the most basic way. And sometimes the best way to protect yourself is to withdraw and other times it’s to be aggressive. I think that’s why he’s totally understandable and ultimately very sympathetic.”

Baumbach’s description seems appropriate not only for the lead of Greenberg, but also for Grover from Kicking and Screaming, Lester Grimm in Mr. Jealousy, any member of the Berkman family from The Squid and the Whale, and Margot from Margot at the Wedding—a parade of prickly, wounded, biting, and remarkably human film characters that have the ability to remind us of ourselves or someone we allow ourselves to love—despite their flaws.