A lifetime of Noah Baumbach

For a very, very long time, Noah Baumbach has been one of my favorite filmmakers and an important influence on my own writing career. His debut, Kicking and Screaming (which from about 2005 to 2015 I had to always clarify was not the Will Ferrell soccer movie) became an instant hit among me and my friends when it dropped into Blockbusters and Hollywoods Video in 1996. Kicking and Screaming, about a bunch of dead-ender privileged white college grads with absolutely no plan or ambition, occupied a lot of the same space that Clerks did, only it was (slightly) more highbrow and infinitely more quotable – at least to us. We were obsessed with that movie and pretty much wore out our VHS copies, which we of course had to special order from Suncoast Video.

A couple years later, Baumbach released his follow-up, Mr. Jealousy. At the time, I was underwhelmed, although I loved Baumbach bringing back Chris Eigeman, who was my favorite actor at the time due to his status as a fixture in the films of Baumbach and Whit Stillman. In the time sense, I've come to greatly appreciate Mr. Jealousy, as I've honed my cynicism meter significantly since I was a teenager. Around the same time, Baumbach's microbudget one-location film Highball made its way onto home video, which he didn't even see fit to put his name on as director (although we all had an inkling).

In San Francisco in 2000, I attended a reading and book signing for Stillman, who had written an adaptation of his third film entitled The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards. I was in heaven, asking questions during the Q&A and getting one of my heroes to laugh, getting books signed and grilling him about whether he was familiar with Baumbach's work and singing the praises of Eigeman in both men's work. (My references to Baumbach attracted the attention of a couple also in attendance, who introduced themselves and said they were always eager to make friends with other people with great taste in movies. I don't think it was a "we noticed you and like your vibe" situation, but given how the rest of my time in San Francisco went, I wish I'd actually called them and attempted to be friends, if that's what that was.)

Baumbach didn't reappear on my radar until 2004, when he co-wrote a movie with my other favorite filmmaker, Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which is the subject of a half-sleeve tattoo that I have. The following year, he dropped The Squid & the Whale, which to most people was his true debut – or at least his debut as a feted auteur worth notice. The film garnered Baumbach his first nomination for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and introduced most moviegoing audiences to Jesse Eisenberg. The Squid and the Whale marked his true shift in focus, of course: moving from college students and college grads who have no idea what to do with their lives to writing about middle-aged people who may or may not have wasted their lives and still have no clear path forward. His next film, Margot at the Wedding, is his bleakest film to date and still one of his most acclaimed.

After co-writing The Fantastic Mr. Fox with Anderson in 2009, the Ben Stiller-starring Greenberg dropped in 2010, a solid film perhaps most notable for co-starring Greta Gerwig, who began a relationship with Baumbach in 2011 that produced both children and Academy Award-nominated films written by the couple. The duo's first co-written film, Frances Ha, a spectacular black and white film about a young sociopath played with gusto by Gerwig, was released in 2012. 2014's While We're Young is neck and neck with Greenberg as Baumbach's most forgettable (post-Highball) film, and fittingly re-teams the director with Stiller. Interestingly, while Greenberg seemed to focus mostly on getting Stiller in his "serious actor" reps, While We're Young appeared to be Stiller's attempt to use his cachet to drag Baumbach into blockbuster success with what was marketed as a "aren't millennials crazy?!" Stiller comedy. Gerwig and Baumbach returned in 2015 with Mistress America, another microbudget mumblecore-adjacent romp with Gerwig in the lead.

The next stage for Baumbach was his Netflix era, where he dropped The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), an absolutely brilliant examination of Jewish guilt and family struggle starring a sublime Adam Sandler alongside Dustin Hoffman. Meyerowitz may still be my favorite Baumbach film, and I really need to revisit it more often. 2019's Marriage Story took Baumbach to yet another level, with awards and nominations galore, an adundance of Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver memes, Laura Dern's long-overdue Oscar win, and one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history for us theater kids: Driver belting "Being Alive" from Company in a piano bar, complete with OBCR dialogue:

Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise in 2022 (once again for Netflix) was met largely with shrugs (although the production design and pitch-black comedy are both without peer), but co-writing Barbie with Gerwig behind the camera essentially forever cemented him as an A-list and in-demand talent.

Baumbach is back with another Netflix original which is sure to pick up at least a couple of acting nominations with this year's Jay Kelly, which is quite simply tremendous. George Clooney plays a version of himself – that is to say, George Clooney plays the titular most famous and successful movie star in the world, suffering through a late-life crisis suddenly realizing he may have been a terrible person for his entire life, and attempts to tail his youngest daughter through Europe to try and salvage some semblance of connection (although what he's really seeking is absolution). Sandler is great (although not nearly as great as he was in Meyerowitz) as Kelly's long-suffering and put-upon agent, who might just be the only friend Kelly has. He's thrown his whole life into the abyss in pursuit of making and then keeping Kelly rich and famous, and finally faces a reckoning of his own as Kelly's team follows their boss into madness.

In truth, I was so gobsmacked by how good the movie (and Clooney, and Sandler, and Dern, and everyone else) was that I sometimes didn't even notice the extreme craftsmanship on display throughout, like this seamless transition from a train bathroom to a daycare in one take that I only clocked when this BTS video was deposited into my algo:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1382809956973547

Incredible stuff. As he's done his whole life (and as Clooney has done since I watched him religiously each week on ER and then followed him into favorites like From Dusk Til Dawn and One Fine Day, to say nothing of his actual best films like Out of Sight and ... pretty much everything else he did up until his recent dirctor era), Baumbach inspires me to create, and to write, and to make movies (or attempt to), and inspires me to wring every last drop out of life ... even if I'll usually fail at it every day.

Failure is a throughline in Baumbach's incredible career, but so is acceptance. May we all experience plenty of both.