There’s no such thing as ‘minor Baumbach,’ argues Bennett Glace in a career-spanning look at the writer-director’s life, work, and the fascinating, often surprising, intersection between the two

In a New Yorker profile by Ian Parker from April 2013, when that year’s Frances Ha was just beginning to usher in a new era for its era-defining star and co-writer, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, the film’s director/co-writer and Gerwig’s romantic partner for a provocatively indeterminate amount of time, presents a possible explanation for audiences’ inconsistency in the types of characters they’ll embrace and behavior they’ll accept. While, to employ the article’s example, Larry David can do literally anything as his avatar on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Baumbach’s previous trilogy, the central masterpieces of his career — The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007), and Greenberg (2010) — had faced increasing derision largely because most audiences couldn’t relate, even consider relating, to off-putting characters like Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) in The Squid and the Whale, and the titular Margot Zeller (Nicole Kidman) and Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller). The Squid and the Whale earned an Academy Award nomination for Baumbach’s screenplay and signaled a return to form of sorts.¹ Its follow-ups proved more alienating to critics and audiences alike. Parker describes Baumbach’s response to both negative reviews and attempts by friends like Steven Soderbergh to reconcile the public’s aversion: 

“‘Do you think it’s because they’re seeing [television characters] over a longer period of time?’ Baumbach asked. Earlier, he had observed that traits one could accept in a novel’s protagonist, or in a complicated friend, often seemed loathsome to modern moviegoers.” 

Without necessarily meaning to, Baumbach suggests the power his films gain on rewatch, upon reflection, and in relation to one another. Over the span of an hour-plus, his characters may seem irksome, even loathsome, and their stories may strike us as “minor,” to paraphrase Bernard. When new versions of the same characters appear to produce offspring or age before our eyes across multiple films, sometimes taking on entirely new bodies and faces, yet never outgrowing their worst insecurities or even abandoning pet phrases,² they’re inevitably more endearing — more fascinating, at least. They come to feel like a family — not our family, but a family — and their worst foibles become the stuff of a greater, major work. Baumbach’s casts count many failed or flailing writers among them. Creating them has, nevertheless, amounted to building an oeuvre worthy of a great novelist. It’s not a shared universe, though it may as well be. Some films play like sequels or remakes and nearly all seem to pull from the same relatively small yet incredibly rich pool of players. 

Baumbach’s decision to liken his leads to complicated friends evinces, perhaps, an attempt to avoid further autobiographical excavation. Comparing them to toxic family members would have seemed too on the nose and invited questions Baumbach was already sick of answering. Parker’s article, naturally, makes note of the fact that Baumbach served as a New Yorker messenger in his teen years and hails from a literary family. His mother, Georgia Brown, and his father, Jonathan Baumbach, are easily mapped onto the warring parents of The Squid and the Whale and numerous characters to follow. They were both interviewed for the piece and, paraphrasing his son, Baumbach Sr. puts an especially fine point on things, “Noah’s joke is that The Squid and the Whale was me at my worst, Margot was Georgia at her worst, and Greenberg was him at his worst.” Though the first was the only one to generate much acclaim upon its release, all three represent Baumbach the filmmaker at his absolute best. 

The dissolution of Baumbach’s marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh, a two-time collaborator, and his ensuing relationship with Gerwig have colored perceptions of the films to come and birthed a whole new genre of critical speculation. When news broke earlier this year that Knopf would soon publish a memoir from Baumbach, I couldn’t have been the only one to wonder what anyone could hope to glean that isn’t there in the films, their reviews, or the interviews about them. That’s not to say that watching a Baumbach film is all about spotting potential references. Nearly every interview and post-screening Q&A, however, will at least threaten to become just that sort of tedious exercise. Though the Kent Jones essay included with the Criterion Collection release of The Squid and the Whale offers little other than the same pat autobiographical speculation, the interview between Jonathan Lethem and Baumbach, first published in BOMB around the time of the film’s release, provides an instructive look at how the auteur mines real-life experience and, through some alchemical creative process, generates fictional gold:

Baumbach: Asking how much of the film is autobiographical is such a loaded question. On the one hand, I started writing from a really emotional place. I attacked my own experience… I just tried to write what felt real to me. But that’s only the starting point. The characters change and become these other people. Stuff is invented… But of course, when it’s boiled down to a question and answer, and people ask you how much of this is autobiographical, I occasionally start stuttering… The answer is, honestly, I don’t know anymore. 

Baumbach goes on to credit interviews with Francois Truffaut and Philip Roth with offering guidance during The Squid and the Whale’s press cycle, where questions about the film’s real-life inspirations abounded. Lethem identifies Roth as a particularly valuable semi-autobiographical artist, remarking, “He’s the master at gaining energy for his writing by not just using his own personal material, but exciting the reader’s anxiety about how much of it is real.” Call it a lofty comparison, and it does read a bit like Bernard calling Kafka a predecessor, but Lethem was right to imply a kinship between Roth’s and Baumbach’s work.³ Though there’s markedly less acid in the mix of experience and imagination that informs Baumbach’s post-Greenberg oeuvre, he’s called Roth an inspiration as recently as while making the rounds for Marriage Story (2019). Their processes, he says, both involve “rubbing two stones of reality together to spark the imagination.” 

Despite differences in their approaches to writing and levels of critical acclaim, Baumbach and Roth share an affinity for depicting all manner of bodily functions. That Roth is most infamous for his passages covering masturbation ignores his incomparable talent for describing defecation in particular. As for Baumbach, there’s probably no mainstream filmmaker with such a firmly two-handed grasp of high (high-middle, really) and low. Who else would expect you to know who George Plimpton and Binky Urban are while simultaneously trusting you’ll laugh at someone stinking up the bathroom before a family meeting or shitting themselves after driving off the road? Throughout this toxic triptych alone you’ll find: a character smearing semen over hall lockers and bookshelves; the same character carrying out a masturbation ritual involving magazine cut-outs and underwear, presumably his mother’s; premature ejaculation and its aftermath; a vivid discussion of vaginal walls; “put me in your mouth;” another character scrutinizing the length of his penis compared to his scrotum; a debate on the merits of pissing sitting down; ruminations on underarm stench; two young characters exchanging bits of dead skin as a way of keeping one another company; some of cinema’s most awkward cunnilingus; and a snippet of conversation dealing with post-coital semen spreading. Baumbach arguably finds the logical apotheosis of these explorations in White Noise‘s Babbette (Gerwig) and Jack (Adam Driver), whose sex life centers on performative readings from a collection of smutty novels. 

Rather than revisit a recurring surrogate, an Antoine Doinel or a Nathan Zuckerman, Baumbach reconfigures similar types, reshuffles traits, and continually experiments with subtle shifts in the placement of his semi-autobiographical spotlight. Identifying the presence of “Noah Baumbach” within the text is not so simple as finding the character who most resembles him. Figures both fully realized and thinly sketched have wondered at the auteur’s central themes, asking why they aren’t where they’re supposed to be by now and how exactly they rate against the agreed-upon standards. Near the end of The Squid and the Whale, Jesse Eisenberg’s Walt Berkman tries to come to terms with his parent’s divorce, trouble at school, and the death of his own short-lived relationship all at once. A dark afternoon of the soul leaves him with little to say but, “I don’t see myself as a person who is in this situation.” Eisenberg’s evocation of Walt is among the essential depictions of unfounded teenage pretension and one of the best performances in any of Baumbach’s films, any film really. Unflinching emphasis on all the things that make Walt recognizably insufferable remind us that Baumbach is not interested in revisiting old feuds to put himself on top. That Walt spends most of the film aping its nominal antagonist, his father, confirms Baumbach’s sympathies and identification are more complicated than they first appear. A much less obvious surrogate and mouthpiece for Baumbach’s concerns is Maureen (Emma Thompson), the alcoholic fourth wife of Howard Meyerowitz. After she and Howard have repaired to the Berkshires, she describes her inability to part with certain remnants of their life together in New York, specifically, a wok. She says, “I’m not gonna make Chinese food again, but you have your idea of yourself. And you want to hold onto that.”

Both across and within films, Baumbach’s choice of potential stand-ins often thwarts the simplest readings. During at least one conversation promoting Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach surprised his interviewer with the revelation that Margot, not her son Claude (Zane Pais), felt closest to his sensibility. Baumbach allows the anxieties around his work and its origins to coalesce during a memorable sequence from the film, the most excruciating sequence in a career filled with them. Dick Koosman (Ciarin Hinds), a writer of historical fiction, interviews Kidman’s title character, a writer of barely disguised fiction drawn from her own history. Her decisions to attend her sister Pauline (Leigh)’s wedding to Malcolm (Jack Black, never better) and hold this reading are primarily an excuse to continue her affair with Dick. At a local bookstore, they discuss a story about an abusive father with a near-incestuous affection for one specific daughter. Dick, smug in the knowledge that his chosen sub-genre protects him from these lines of questioning, comes right out and asks, “For someone who writes so nakedly about family, I wonder, how autobiographical is this portrait?” By this point, Pauline has repeatedly charged Margot with lifting experiences wholesale. She demurs, she’s used to this theorizing and ensures the audience that her father, while complicated, was not a direct inspiration for the episodes in the story. She’s unmoored when Dick elaborates, “But I’m interested in how the father could, in fact, be a portrait of you.” Her rambling response turns the uncomfortable sequence into one of Baumbach’s most excoriating. She tries to relate an anecdote about needing her refrigerator repaired that winds up providing an opportunity to articulate the ugly prejudices that harsher critics are eager to read into Baumbach’s more blindly privileged characters. She wonders as to the repairman’s race and IQ before, in a decision she frames as a moment of writerly insight, sensing an anger in him and beginning to fear for her life. Baumbach avoids cringing reaction shots, preferring to settle on impassive expressions from Dick, Pauline, and others in the crowd. A shock to her sense of self and moral correctness has left Margot unable to hold or even read an audience. She showcases Baumbach’s brand of queasy self-critique while calling to mind writers who’d feel lost without a recognizable autobiographical framework for approaching his films. 

Margot’s unfiltered comments suit a film where Pauline’s neighbors, the Voglers, attract an almost colonial sense of dread and fascination; Margot and Claude take a boat to get there, after all. Seeming to enact primitive rites, the Voglers present such an over-the-top affront as to become comical. Their feuds with Pauline and Malcolm are already the stuff of legend before the film begins. Pauline’s daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross) can’t remember whether or not they’ve ever actually terrorized the family with broken glass yet certainly regards it as a genuine threat. Late in the film, the Vogler’s cretinous son descends on the cousins in the woods, hurling a dead animal and homophobic insults before biting Claude. This near-troglodytic depiction of the less-refined clan next door might come across as plainly offensive were the film’s central family not captured with such a similarly unforgiving eye. Malcolm’s inarticulate attempt to explain the differences between the neighbors and the family he’s about to marry into reveals both his fitness for Baumbach’s uneasy world and the intentionally blurry distinctions between all the unpleasantness on screen. “I think they resent us because we’re,” he searches for the words, “I don’t know what we are.”

Structurally, the film plays like a corrective, rebalancing the scales by presenting alternate versions of The Squid and the Whale’s Joan (Laura Linney) and Frank (Owen Klein) and affording them more screen time. Otherwise, it’s quite the opposite, a kind of doubling down. If you thought Baumbach had a blinkered, literati-centric worldview or a perverse interest in writing characters who act badly, watching Margot at the Wedding won’t disabuse you of those notions. A moment like Claude spying two naked Voglers through a knothole finds myriad echoes like Margot’s persistent snooping, Pauline and Malcolm’s own outdoor tryst, and the boudoir photos left for Maisy (Haley Feiffer), the babysitter, to find. Like one of Rohmer’s summer-set romantic comedies — La Collectionneuse (1967) or Pauline at the Beach (1983) come to mind — the film possesses a sexuality that’s ripening into spoilage, characterized by deliberate voyeurism, over-sharing discussions, thin-walled familiarity, and even outright impropriety. What intoxicates in a Rohmer film just sickens here. By the time Claude is frankly discussing his masturbation habits, even Margot, who longs for the days when her son was “rounder, more graceful,” taps out. Cinematographer Harris Savides captures all the proceedings with imposing shadows and bilious yellow hues that evoke the experience of adjusting to sunlight as well as the perpetually jaundiced eye of its authorial lens. 

Though decidedly less polished, The Squid and the Whale’s distinct visual style likewise situates the viewer within a subjective, recollection-inflected headspace. Without a Fabelmans-, Licorice Pizza-,or even an Armageddon Time-sized budget, Baumbach can’t take us back to the mid-’80s Brooklyn of his youth in a time machine. He instead opens a time capsule, one whose contents are informed by persistent memories rather than the empty era-specific signifiers favored by most peddlers of ’80s nostalgia, favored by Baumbach himself in the underrated White Noise (2022). Baumbach and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman tend to trap characters within tight frames, keeping the camera close to their bodies even as they make their way down broad Brooklyn sidewalks. This is Park Slope ca. 1986 as it is remembered, felt, and filtered through decades of additional experience, not as it was lived. Like the sometimes-distracting digital de-aging in The Irishman (2019) or the non-existent de-aging in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), cracks in the façade only serve the sense that we’re looking back via the only means available: imperfect memory. If those seem like lofty comparisons for a brief, minimally budgeted domestic drama, they shouldn’t. At the film’s conclusion, Baumbach confirms that gazing at one’s navel and into one’s past can mean looking out over a vista as expansive as a Museum of Natural History diorama, as New York itself, as the ocean’s murky depths. Kent Jones’ insistence that Baumbach ultimately confirms what a small world New York’s literary scene is stands as yet another case study in critics putting the filmmaker in a box he bursts out of. That final shot, which observes Walt from a relative distance, breaks from the close-up-heavy cinematic language of the film preceding it. It’s a moment rife with paradox — one in which Walt’s sense of smallness against the city and the entire adult world can only be articulated in terms at once grandiose and intimate, personal and public, reflective and immediate. The fundamental sense of anachronism (the museum has changed a lot since Baumbach’s ’80s) only immerses us more deeply. Both the barriers between 1986 and 2005 and those between the real and semi-imagined Baumbach dissolve. Walt’s moment of realization is nevertheless undercut by the looming shadow of his own squid and whale and the shadow The Squid and the Whale continues to cast over its writer-director’s career. The credits roll and once an abbreviated “Street Hassle” wraps up, Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song” kicks in. It might connote a triumphant emergence for Walt if not for how much it foreshadows Claude’s near-drowning in Margot at the Wedding and Roger’s labored doggy paddle in Greenberg. Wainwright sings, “This summer, I almost drowned,” and unbeknownst to him or to contemporary viewers, tells us what to expect from Baumbach’s follow-up films. 

Throughout The Squid and the Whale, Bernard employs the term “dense” as an improbable compliment. The lyrics to Pink Floyd’s “Hey You,” which he briefly believes Walt wrote, constitute a dense text. It’s an affectation Walt himself borrows. He uses “dense” to describe his father’s novels, which he’s only skimmed. The term could be used to describe both the endlessly rewarding writing and deceptively detailed visual style of Baumbach’s work in general and this trio of films in particular. Inspired by snatches of memory, The Squid and the Whale is appropriately fleet and filled with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments of insight. A tennis match between Bernard and his romantic rival, Ivan (Daniel Baldwin), communicates a lifetime of resentment via several inserts of an increasingly drenched Bernard. It’s easy to miss the few seconds when he seems to consider rushing over the court to brawl with the detested jock. Another seconds-long sequence sees Bernard open a rejection letter. Sadness curdles into resentment as we dissolve into a brusque exchange with Frank. The dejection is so quickly sublimated and we move ahead so fast that this moment of empathy for a quite monstrous character is easily ignored, especially when he’ll soon send Frank out alone to buy himself Tylenol and then ask for the change; Later, he’ll pause to let Walt’s girlfriend, Sophie (Feiffer), contribute toward their dinner bill. When Bernard and Joan meet with a school administrator (Maryann Plunkett) to discuss Frank’s habit of masturbating in the school library and halls, Baumbach’s father is briefly reflected in the glass across from them. After a performance of “Hey You” earns him a cash prize, Walt momentarily locks eyes with a Pretty Girl (a pre-fame Alexandra Daddario) to Sophie’s unspoken recognition. The best bit of characterization through transitory pause comes toward the film’s close when Bernard arrives at Joan’s house unannounced and stops to consider his work’s place, his place, on her bookshelf. Earlier sequences saw Joan scramble to hide her books from Bernard in advance of their separation. For a man whose personal journey has long been sign-posted by his published work, whose very sense of self-worth has long been more or less determined by each novel’s reception among the right sorts of people (“it’s [Norman] Mailer’s favorite of my novels”), that Joan held onto these books is the only sign he needs that the relationship is potentially salvageable. That Baumbach filled Joan’s shelves with books from his mother’s collection and dressed Bernard in his father’s clothes only adds to the poignancy. 

Our time spent with Bernard, once semi-successful, and Margot, still quite successful, only partially acclimatizes us to the experience of spending time with Roger Greenberg, almost successful more than a decade ago. As if to slowly ease viewers in, the first ten minutes of Greenberg focus on Gerwig’s Florence. Anyone going into the film without having seen its poster or read a synopsis might think she was the titular character. She picks up dry cleaning under the name Phillip Greenberg and it’s another minute or so before we see her drop it off at her boss (Chris Messina)’s house. Before we meet Stiller’s title misanthrope, we’re introduced to Los Angeles as Florence descends into it. She’ll soon note that she’s been out of college for as long as she was in it, but her journey throughout the opening credits mirrors that of cinema’s most famous recent graduate. Beginning atop a smog-shrouded Hollywood hill, she enters the film from left to right, reversing Benjamin Braddock’s post-landing course in The Graduate (1967). She makes a similar journey twice and repeats the same line, “Are you gonna let me in?” It’s not as obvious an opening line as Squid and The Whale’s “Mom and me versus you and dad,” but its meaning reveals itself more quickly than “I sat next to the wrong person,” a line whose significance relies on Margot at the Wedding’s Graduate-esque final moments. She and Roger are quickly entangled in a relationship tailor-made to inflame the Cinema Sins crowd. Among some critics, the usual autobiographical probing was replaced by speculation as to the believability of the central couple.⁴

Before Roger and Florence’s courtship begins in earnest, we get to know Roger by way of his reintroduction to former friends and bandmates. Fifteen years ago, he performed and recorded music with Ivan (Rhys Ifans) and Beller (Mark Duplass). He greets both characters with his portion of an inside joke. We come to understand that he sabotaged their chance at a major-label record deal. It feels appropriate that the nature of Roger’s objections to the contract remain vague; he probably couldn’t articulate them if he tried. Roger is visiting from New York to house- and dog-sit for his vacationing brother after spending time in a psychiatric hospital. He and Ivan have kept in touch to an extent. Though Roger has no idea Ivan is sober, he feels familiar enough to weigh in on his friend’s marital troubles. With some difficulty, Ivan talks Roger into attending a child’s birthday party at Beller’s house, leading to the most singularly directed and edited sequence of this chapter of Baumbach’s career. Three awkward conservations, one of them fairly combative, play out in non-chronological chunks. The uncharacteristically jagged presentation places us within Roger’s headspace twice over. We endure the disorientation and sensory overload of reunions with Beller and Beth (Leigh), Roger’s ex, as well as the frantic experience trying to make sense of these events after the fact. At home again, Roger flips through the guide Phillip left behind to find Florence’s number. Factors including Roger’s own bold autobiographical generalizations (“I think you’re transferring shit onto me”) will come to complicate their attempts at connection. 

Among the expensive knick-knacks decorating Phillip’s home is an antique wind-up toy that Roger plays with during anxious idle moments. The xylophonist moves with an ease and precision that Roger, who can neither commit to “doing nothing” nor take decisive action, must envy. When he first winds it up, it appears to provide inspiration for his primary creative outlet, writing angry letters to corporations and politicians. Following a fight with Florence and a failed reconciliation with Beth, Savides’ camera fixes on Roger and executes a 360-degree pan. It winds up finding him right where we left him. We can infer that the pool party Roger is about to throw won’t serve the enlivening function he hopes. At different points in the film, Florence gifts Roger with antique stick puppets, first a witch and then a devil. Roger’s incredulous responses on both occasions make him sound like a child who didn’t get what they’d hoped for on Christmas. His overall sense of dissatisfaction reaches its zenith during a climactic argument with Ivan. “It’s huge,” Ivan says, “to finally embrace the life you never planned on,” before acknowledging for the first time how badly he was hurt by the dissolution of their band. A blow-out full of personal remarks culminates in Roger exclaiming, “Of course I know what it’s like to live a life I didn’t plan on. What the fuck do you think I’m doing right now?”⁵ It’s the clearest articulation of Baumbach’s key themes yet, one that marks Roger as perhaps the quintessential example of a certain kind of Baumbach character. The film ends with a tentative reconciliation as Florence prepares to listen to a long-winded voicemail (“really a letter”) from Roger. “OK, this is you,” she says, drawing the film to a close and leaving us to imagine her reaction to lines like “You’re 25, I was just 27” and (41-year-old) Roger’s coked-up explication of Wall Street (1987). The persistent impulse to assume Greenberg’s is an uncomplicatedly happy ending, that Florence and Roger make it work despite it all, and to hold that against Baumbach, present further evidence of just how frustratingly popular the autobiographical reading remains.

Opening and closing on Florence, of course, predicts the influence Gerwig would come to have over Baumbach’s life and subsequent work. In the New Yorker article that officially broke the news of their relationship and their collaboration on the then-untitled Mistress America (2015), Parker anticipates Frances Ha’s reception among “Baumbach purists.” Such audiences, Parker writes, “may dismiss the film as evidence of the kind of midlife giddiness that can lead to kite-surfing.” It’s easier to reductively regard Gerwig as Baumbach’s mood-lightening muse than to wrestle with the ways they exchange ideas or what it ultimately means to lighten the mood. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone discuss the influence Baumbach may have had on Gerwig’s output so far. One exchange from her 2017 solo directorial debut, the masterful Lady Bird (a film Bernard might call “the filet of the Millennial coming-of-age genre”), finds characters locked in a classically Baumbachian debate. Their question is whether or not a person can possess two seemingly contradictory qualities, can they be two things at once? Danny (Lucas Hedges) contends that Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan)’s mother is both scary and warm. Lady Bird maintains that a person can’t possibly be both. The argument sounds almost exactly like Malcolm and Pauline’s discussion of Margot’s prying and unprompted diagnoses. “Well, can’t she both,” Pauline asks, “care deeply and be crazy? Do people have to be all one thing?” It’s a question that haunts characters across both Baumbach and Gerwig’s bodies of work, populated as they are with students, graduates, divorcees, and various sufferers of mid- and quarter-life crises. 

Gerwig and Baumbach are playing with dolls again in their latest collaboration, the much-ballyhooed Barbie (2023). A New Yorker article published in anticipation of the film has reintroduced the pair to audiences as they prepare to enter a new era. It has, appropriately, sparked its own kind of debate about whether or not a person or a film has to be “all one thing.” Among Alex Barasch’s scoops are the news that Mattel is hoping to kickstart an IP-driven cinematic universe and that Gerwig will direct two Chronicles of Narnia movies for Netflix. Quotations from Jeremy Barber, an agent who represents both auteurs, find the Barbie-helmer setting formidable, if distressing, goals. “Greta and I,” he remarks, “have been very consciously constructing a career. Her ambition is to be not the biggest woman director but a big studio director.” Barber’s emphasis implies we should know exactly what he means and risks taking Gerwig out of one box and putting her into another equally restrictive one. A quote directly from Gerwig paints a slightly more promising picture. “My feeling,” she explains, “was always that I don’t need to make a Barbie movie, I want to make this one.” Her outlook, it seems, is somewhat like Ivan’s at the end of Greenberg, committed to making the best of an unexpected situation and avoiding, wherever possible, the requisite clichés. There’s a good bit of Roger in the discussions around selling out. For now I’ll choose to believe Gerwig and Baumbach can be both purveyors of IP-driven content and filmmakers of genuine value. 

Speaking to Parker all those years ago, Baumbach says he regrets that The Squid and the Whale failed to capture what a great moviegoing companion his father was. “He wouldn’t diminish The Jerk. If I liked it, he liked it,” Baumbach says, “He could see it through my eyes.” Barbie certainly promises to be dense in the classic sense, if not “dense” by Bernard’s definition. Barasch’s description of its various thematic strands⁶ makes it sound a little like the focus-grouped Itchy and Scratchy Show. Even Barbie herself (Margot Robbie) acknowledges the potential pitfalls of doing too many things at once in her conversations with Barasch. Baumbach and Gerwig have always shown surprising versatility. However easily they’re labeled as one kind of writer or director, they have so far executed complicated balancing acts. Nights and Weekends is threadbare and richly textured; The Squid and the Whale enervates and restores; Lady Bird captures moments both uproarious and heartbreaking; Margot at the Wedding proves both revolting and enticing; Little Women features bold flourishes and classical gestures; Greenberg moves frantically and listlessly; Frances Ha’s tone is both ebullient and despairing; Mistress America plays as both acidic and affectionate. Maybe I’m just too indulgent, maybe Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have, through their work, become like complicated friends whose worst impulses I’m too keen to ignore. Either way, I plan on trying to watch Barbie through their eyes to see the same dense text, the same kind of dense text, they do. 

1. I say “of sorts” because I don’t think Baumbach ever lost it. In fact, I think Mr. Jealousy (1997) is way better than Kicking and Screaming (1995) and if you think I don’t like Highball (1997), a movie Baumbach disowned but which features Peter Bogdanovich doing some of his famous impressions, you’re out of your mind!
2. The great joy of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017), Baumbach’s uneven first film for Netflix, is its lived-in sense of routine and tradition. It’s a film of inside jokes and stories told ad nauseam that, for long-time Baumbach fans, checks in on familiar characters. Embittered patriarch Howard Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) not only suggests an older Bernard due to his ‘minor artist’ status, but sounds just like him when he reverently name-drops John McEnroe, asks about his grandson’s opinion of the Knicks, and finds a strange way to use the word elegant. 
3. Neither hit it out of the park every time. The late, ever-cancellable Roth’s examination of the Lewinsky scandal in The Human Stain (2000), for example, has aged like milk and While We’re Young’s digs at those damned Brooklyn hipsters reeked of mothballs even in 2014. It was no surprise to learn the script sat on the shelf for some time. 
4. Mike D’Angelo devoted an entire edition of his Scenic Routes column (RIP the A.V. Club), usually reserved for close readings of notable film sequences, to his inability to suspend disbelief throughout the back half of Greenberg. He admits to publishing the column as a way of asking readers whether or not they believed one particular fight was realistic. 
5. One of the more contented characters in Baumbach’s corpus offers an alternative take on a similar thought near the end of Kicking and Screaming. Chet (Eric Stoltz), a bartender and long-time college senior, explains how he came to terms with a life stuck in one place: “After my seventh or eighth year, I began to feel like I was using myself. Somehow I experienced my time as a postponement of my life, but eventually I just realized that this is my life . . . some people need to have a real career, which is something that I’ve never really understood — why someone would want to be a vet or a lawyer or a filmmaker. I’m paraphrasing myself here, but I am a student and that’s what I chose. You might need to choose something else.” To Grover (Josh Hamilton), Chet is both a cautionary and aspirational figure. 
6. The film is “somehow simultaneously a critique of corporate feminism, a love letter to a doll that has been a lightning rod for more than half a century, and a sendup of the company that actively participated in the adaptation.”