Greenberg

There are 140 reviews of Greenberg in Rotten Tomatoes, of which 103 (74%) are favourable. None of the summaries of the critiques note the key plot-line of a movie directed and co-written by Brooklyn-born Noah Baumbach. It focuses on middle-aged angst as it afflicts a NY Jew; it's a 21st-Century update of a Woody Allen scenario, a genre in itself.

Its neurotic self-absorbed world-weary anti-hero is played by Ben Stiller. He's left NY, and a mental hospital, to house-sit for 6 weeks for his successful rich brother in LA. He habitually writes complaint letters, the script cleverly indicating his psychological edginess.

The family's dog is an Alsatian called, predictably, Mahler; its paid "assistant" is a young blonde doormat of a character called Florence (Greta Gerwig in a fetching Winslett-like performance). Even they have got internal problems.

Baumbach's past screenplays (Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding and more) evinced detailed understanding of intellectual Jewish families' lives. From experience: his father was a NY novelist and film critic. His co-screenwriter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is Jewish too (and the daughter of actor Vic Morrow). She appears too, as Greenberg's college-days girlfriend. This movie's slow-paced or biting dialogue often seems to have been improvised before it was written down, in the style of Leigh's work for her own semi-autobiographical Anniversary Party.

The party scenes in Greenberg are similarly stuffed with Hollywood pals. The brothers of actors Gwyneth Paltrow and James Franco. Children of actor Dustin Hoffman, writer David Mamet and director Julien Temple. Although Stiller is the son of Jewish-American comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the screenplay goes out of its way to tell us very self-consciously that Greenberg had a Protestant mother.

Ms Gerwig's origins are not yet known, and the only clear non-Jewish participant in the movie is Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, giving an admirably understated performance as Greenberg's college-days fellow-band-member. Stiller himself also creates an unusually nuanced (for him) character, achieving the hard task of making an audience take an interest in the fortune of a socially-inept short-tempered egocentric, who exemplifies Florence's maxim that "hurt people hurt people".

Unfortunately for Stiller, his make-up artist and credited "colorist" give him the appearance throughout the movie of a height-challenged Daniel Day-Lewis, a good actor who's not a good funnyman. Neither is Stiller, who's consequently better cast than usual as the louche, mildly manic and despicable Greenberg.

Is a Jewish (even half-Jewish) narcissist such a standard figure in the American entertainment industry that no critic felt the need to note the consequent limitations of the movie's appeal? Was the movie's apparently off-putting title enough warning? Maybe: it only grossed US$2.3 million at the American box office. Both the Fockers did much better - and were much worse; the strength of Greenberg is that it set out to be a character study first and offbeat comedy second.