GREENBERG: In The Green Zone

Posted by: John Marks
Originally posted on the Purple State of Mind website

by JOHN MARKS

We talk constantly about terrorism in this country, but we give relatively little time to the concept of terror itself. What lies at the heart of that experience? What is the most terrifying thought for most people most of the time? Is it really the possibility that we might end up on the wrong plane or subway car with a suicidal Islamist one day?

Or is the face of real terror, the kind that gets you up in the middle of the night, a bland and quiet thing, like the fear of suddenly finding yourself a mentally troubled, middle-aged man in the city of Los Angeles without a drivers license or a job? As I watched Ben Stiller’s haunted face in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, I saw a form of terror that our movies almost never touch: that of finding yourself an abject failure in an America where worldly success is the measure of everything.

In Greenberg, Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a failed musician and barely functioning carpenter who returns to his native LA after leaving a mental institution, or so we’re told. The performance and script suggest a man fully capable of exaggerating the extent of the malady and its treatment, but the true nature of the diagnosis hardly matters. Stiller’s Greenberg is a man who lives in his own personal Green Zone, a terrorized individual no longer able to function in the chaotic and dangerous world outside his own skin.

He carries his sanatorium on his back, in other words, and the movie depicts his painful attempt to escape. But Greenberg can’t get out on his own. He must be extracted.

Enter our heroine. In a conventional movie about terrorism, she would be the fearless FBI agent, but in Greenberg, the agent doesn’t wear a sidearm and probably never met a jihadist she didn’t like. As played unforgettably by Greta Gerwig, the Jamie Lee Curtis of Mumblecore flicks, the character of Florence Marr saves the day with nothing more than a series of rumpled sweaters, a love of music and a willingness to have sex with men who don’t deserve her.

The movie’s one stretch is the very idea that an attractive young woman with her life ahead of her would fall for a guy as rude and clueless as Greenberg, but Gerwig’s performance makes it work. We understand early on that she’s not living up to her potential. We get that she just barely manages to navigate her way emotionally in the vast labyrinth that is Los Angeles. She has no clue that she’s wonderful, and none of the men in her life are going to tell her.

Basically, Florence is a lily floating on the surface of a great, horrific, American city, and Greenberg floats by like a frog on a rock. When he hops, she’s ready to catch.

It’s funny, but watching this small movie about small people just trying to survive their own lives, I couldn’t help thinking about a movie I’d just seen. I hadn’t meant to color-coordinate my day at the movies, but a window of time cleared up, and there were the two best options: Green Zone followed by Greenberg.

I’m glad that it worked out that way. The former movie is as loud as the latter is quiet, loud in every way, in fact, and the contrast is edifying.

Right from the start, the makers of Green Zone signal to us that they have made an important film, and it never once seems to have dawned on them that they have made the opposite. Failure seems to hold no terror for them. It’s not an option, as the gung-ho movie soldiers like to say. That may explain why a movie with so much gunfire has so little power.

A thriller set against the backdrop of the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in the early days of the invasion of Baghdad, Green Zone begins with the shock and awe campaign and never really lets up. It’s the first time I’ve seen complacency in the director Paul Greengrass, who revolutionized action films with two of the Bourne films and United 93. Here, his gifts as a master choreographer of action serve to hide a truth almost as awful as the one about the missing WMD’s. He has no story. All he has here is an op-ed disguised as a plot, and it’s an op-ed that we’ve been reading ad nauseum for years.

We know by now that the Bush administration went to war using the over-stated threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction as its flawed raison d’etre. But no matter where one stands on the continuum of opinion, there are a lot of different ways to slice that story-line. Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland don’t even bother to lift the knife. They seem to believe that the audience will accept almost any swipe against the Bushies as a breathtaking revelation.

The book upon which the movie is ostensibly based, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City , seems to have been tossed aside. Instead, Matt Damon as Army Chief Miller and poor, misused Amy Ryan as a Wall Street Journal reporter who gets taken to the woodshed for lacking journalistic integrity have to put on brave faces and push to the end of this cinematic screed like Lawrence of Arabia crossing the Sinai.

Some time later, I walked out of Green Zone feeling bullied and harassed and not at all convinced that these very gifted filmmakers grasped the extent of their failure. Not only had they missed an opportunity to make an interesting and sophisticated case against the policy that they so obviously despised, they had screwed up the more basic task at hand. Halfway through their action movie, I almost fell asleep.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into Greenberg and suddenly found myself confronted with the most gripping movie of the year, a story about a guy at the end of his rope who gets saved by the girl with a little rope to spare. No one involved had to insist on the importance of the story. No one had to throw in a shaky cam to simulate an unstable reality.

Everything that matters in Greenberg emerges from the faces of Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig. The terror of their characters is palpable, and we feel it, and that transference of sympathy is why we go to the movies in the first place. As far as I can tell, it’s the only real antidote to terrorism.