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Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is a movie devoid of ambition.  Little happens, and anything that does is superficial and non-challenging.  The real tragedy is that the film so readily embraces this nonchalance and seems to excuse it as a statement about society.

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is house-sitting for his brother Phillip (Chris Messina), after being treated for a nervous breakdown.  Rather than pushing himself to do something worthwhile, he leads his own personal crusade against initiative.  Somehow all of his whining catches the eye of his brother’s drugged out P.A., Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig).  Roger re-unites with an old friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), and their interactions are wholly uninteresting.  As Roger and Florence bring Phillip’s dog to the vet and back, they form a bond out of their shared low standards and sexual frustration.  They fight and get back together, then the movie ends.  There are a couple of missed moments and shallow tangents, but at heart, nothing happens.

The few highlights of the movie were slight jokes that, albeit hysterical, would have been equally hysterical within any story.  One such line was used to describe an old fling: “If you worked with her in an office you’d have a crush on her, but outside of that you’d start to wonder if she really was as cute as you’d thought.” While this is a slightly insightful comment about office crushes, its inclusion in this particular movie feels rather arbitrary. The best jokes in Baumbach’s masterpiece, The Squid and the Whale, were equally rib-tickling, but actually served a purpose within the story (i.e. the left-handed desk).