Short Takes
GREENBERG
Noah Baumbach's vinegary comedy-drama provides Ben Stiller one of his toughest, most rewarding roles, while forcing him out of comfortable postures and familiar shtick. Now approaching 40, his Roger Greenberg has lost his band a shot at a recording contract and failed as a carpenter. Unsure what he wants to do, with few gifts besides splenetic rants and needling others, he moves from New York to California, where he meets and is attracted to his brother's assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig). She's simultaneously repelled and drawn to Greenberg's rants and unpredictability, but he really prefers former girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also collaborated with her husband Baumbach on the film's script and overall structure) — even if she's smart enough to know what failed once has little chance of working a second time. Baumbach, known of late for his bilious slice-of-pain comedies Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale, has no interest in making audiences comfortable, and Greenberg's chronicle of a man unable to find inner peace or social satisfaction reaches even higher levels of squirmy discomfort. These are leavened somewhat by Baumbach's scalpel-sharp comic writing, as when Greenberg emerges as disapproving elder moralist to a houseful of hip slackers — but as a portrait of a man who's discovered in middle age that he'll likely never come close to achieving his dreams, it's a dour, bleak film that mostly offers viewers an ideal role model for what not to become. (Now playing at Green Hills) — RON WYNN
THE GHOST WRITER
No director has done more with the idea of confinement, either as theme or visual strategy, than Roman Polanski, and the setting of his diverting offhand thriller is a classic Polanski no-man's-land: a remote beach house surrounded by inhospitable wide open spaces, yet whose most striking feature is an invisible-wall window that makes the people inside look like mimes doing a box routine. In this tongue-in-cheek adaptation of a Robert Harris espionage yarn, Ewan McGregor plays a celebrity ghost writer hired to spice up the dull memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan, more Dubya than Tony Blair and wickedly funny). Once stranded in semi-exile at the ex-minister's seaside getaway, however, with his subject's brittle wife (Olivia Williams), adoring assistant (Kim Cattrall) and houseful of sinister guards and surly servants, he begins to suspect that the previous ghost writer's death was hardly an accident. As a thriller, this is slight: The mystery is a muddle, the big reveal seems small potatoes, and a war-crimes subplot reduces torture to a McGuffin — although Polanski makes subtle satiric jabs at the way the debate over coercion has become audiovisual wallpaper, to the relief of its practitioners. (News here functions mostly as promotion.) But there is great pleasure in watching the 76-year-old director impart an elegant, sinister wit to his impeccable widescreen framing, making comic sport of the cosmic futility of McGregor's detective work. The margins are filled with throwaway gags and bits of business, keyed to McGregor's amusingly bemused reactions: It all leads to a nifty sick-joke punchline, pulled off by the director with a master's flourish — the sort of finish that gives a minor diversion the lingering buzz of a major delight. Catch it before the weekend in theaters if you plan to see it — my weeknight show was deserted. (Now showing) — JIM RIDLEY
