Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach Make Each Other Better

The Big Picture

• Noah Baumbach’s career evolved from “Sundance darling” to a mature storyteller over time.
• Baumbach’s collaboration with Greta Gerwig injected humor and energy into his work.
• Gerwig and Baumbach’s collaborations like
  Frances Ha
  and
  Mistress America
  showcased a successful partnership.

Noah Baumbach is one of the most exciting directors working today, but like many great artists, his success wasn’t overnight. Baumbach was among a generation of “Sundance darlings” in the 1990s that emerged as bold innovators thanks to their wild stylistic differentiation: the films of Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Kevin Smith, Alfonso Cuaron, and Sofia Coppola, among others, felt exciting, fresh, and more youthful than the blockbusters of the 1980s. While Baumbach’s 1995 directorial debut Kicking and Screaming suggested that he would be the latest to join this eclectic group of filmmakers, his career faced repetition when it became apparent that the youthful, whimsical irony of Kicking and Screaming wasn’t a style that he could retain for the rest of his career. It took a key collaboration with Greta Gerwig to reignite Baumbach’s career, which in turn inspired her to develop her own voice as a storyteller. Their work together as writers for Barbie is what made the film so great.

Tracking Noah Baumbach’s Career From the Beginning

Kicking and Screaming may seem like the quintessential “Sundance gem” now, but at the time of its release, the film’s plainspoken, whimsical examination of single life for college students felt like a breath of fresh air; compared to other 1990s independent comedies like Singles and Chasing Amy, it’s also one that’s aged fairly well. Kicking and Screaming showed that there was a self-reflective maturity to Baumbach, and that he wasn’t interested in lionizing his characters in the same way that many of his contemporaries were. Unlike the characters of a Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez film, there was nothing “cool” about Josh Hamilton’s Grover or Chris Eigeman’s Max. In fact, Baumbach seemed to relish the fact that they were losers!

The issue with this level of awareness is that over time, Baumbach’s honesty became somewhat of a gimmick. While the acidity of his characters and the blunt truthfulness of his screenplays occasionally yielded success (as was the case with 2005’s The Squid and The Whale, which brought him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay), it seemed like Baumbach was content with relishing in his own misery. Baumbach’s Highball, Mr. Jealousy, and Margot at the Wedding aren’t dishonest in their awkward view of relationships, but it didn’t make them particularly enjoyable to watch. It took a key collaboration with Gerwig to inject something that had been absent in Baumbach’s post-Kicking and Screaming work: humor!

‘Greenburg’ Marked the Beginning of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Collaborations

Greenberg is both literally and subtextually a film about an artist falling in love with Gerwig; while on a narrative level, the 2010 dramedy is about the lonely single man Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) falling in love with the younger woman Florence Marr (Gerwig), it felt like Baumbach was curating his entire style around the new burst of energy at the center of his film. Greenberg isn’t a fully realized work in the way that Gerwig and Baumbachs’ later films would be — there is still some of the leftover animosity, awkwardness, and venomous humor from his last few films. This could be attributed to the fact that Gerwig wasn’t a co-writer, as the film was actually co-written by Baumbach’s then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh (prior to a divorce that is thought to have inspired the plot of Baumbach’s subsequent masterpiece Marriage Story).

To make a comparison to another legendary New York director/actor duo, Greenberg is the equivalent of what Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese did with Mean Streets. While not necessarily the best film of either of their careers, it was certainly the most important film. The rhythm that Gerwig and Baumbach established with each other working on Greenberg allowed them to create Frances Ha, which may be the perfect amalgamation of both of their sensibilities. Frances Ha has all the insight on dating, single life, New York pretentiousness, and youthful ignorance that Baumbach excels at, but Gerwig inserted a level of pure joy, humor, and energy that hadn’t been present in his films for quite some time. Is there a more pure expression of happiness in the history of filmmaking than watching Gerwig dance down the streets of New York to the theme of David Bowie’s “Modern Love?”

Gerwig and Baumbach’s Success Together

Baumbach and Gerwig reunited in 2015 for a spiritual sequel to Frances Ha with Mistress America. In many ways, Gerwig’s character feels like a version of Frances, whose carefree lifestyle had caught up to her after a few too many years of total independence. While not quite as hilarious as Frances Ha, Mistress America is a maturation that indicates that neither Baumbach nor Gerwig was interested in retreading the past. Even Baumbach’s work outside of Gerwig seemed to be sensationalized with a newfound passion for the medium. In what felt like a very obvious nod to their work together, his next film While We’re Young explored the complex relationship between an older married couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who begins to emulate the lifestyle of a youthful couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). It’s not hard to see that Seyfried is doing a Gerwig impression!

It was during the time that Gerwig turned to making her own features that Baumbach did some of the most personal work of his career. It was as if working with Gerwig had opened Baumbach up to be a more honest version of himself. 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) allowed him to address the anxieties, guilt, and familial abuse that he had often alluded to, and 2019’s Marriage Story felt like a direct reflection of his own marriage. It was during this time that Gerwig made Lady Bird, a high school coming-of-age dramedy that felt like the Kicking and Screaming of its generation.

As writers, directors, and artists, Gerwig and Baumbach are perfectly suited for each other, and it’s exciting to see how deeply their work has become intertwined. Baumbach’s most recent film was White Noise (a film that satirizes consumerism and brand affinity), and Gerwig has directed the Barbie movie, which she wrote with Baumbach. Regardless of whether their next project is one they work on together or not, filmgoers can rest easy knowing that their brief collaborations ended up benefiting them both.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s latest collaboration, Barbie, is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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