Sometimes Noah Baumbach can’t help but trip over yourself. A prominent figure in the indie movement known as mumblecore, which favored a certain intimate way of looking at people and their relationships, her films have always enjoyed critical acclaim if not as much public attention. Her intellectual approach, sometimes, is the insurmountable barrier that prevents her from having a greater sense of event with her movies.
Even though she can make pertinent observations about humanity and its behaviors, her stories end up so self-absorbed and her own vision of bohemian New York that its characters and their behaviors are inaccessible. It happens, for example, in his new film ‘Background noise’, which is capable of diluting the message of a consumerist society consumed by post-catastrophe paranoia because of things like a family with excessively intellectual and smug characters who are impenetrable .
Shared custody
His best film, curiously, falls into the opposite of all that. ‘A Brooklyn Story’, available for streaming through Filmin, shows us a family that is also bohemian, but instead of facing a natural disaster, they come across a familiar and everyday one: divorce. baumbach deposits part of your childhood memories (although he rejects that the film is autobiographical) in this story of two sons of writer parents in 1980s New York.
Jeff Daniels is the father university professor, with a successful and acclaimed novel for some time but who has been stuck for a long time unable to get something lucid or that causes interest. Laura Linney is also a writer, of less prestige but who manages to get her book published and cause interest. Both have reached a point where they cannot continue together and They have joint custody of their two children..
They both keep a complex relationship with his parents, being each one more prone to choose a parent with whom they are more akin. The most interesting and the one who seems to have more of Baumbach’s own experience is the older one, played by Jesse Eisenberg. Absorbed by the false intellectual authority of his father, from whom he copies many expressions to make a greater impression, he despises her mother for seeing her as the cause of the divorce.
‘A Brooklyn Story’: How to Observe Divorce
Baumbach manages to explore divorce well from a youth perspective, avoiding conventional drama and leaving believable and interesting realism without causing distance that, well, we are facing a wealthy family of writers in New York. He’s good at pointing out Eisenberg’s character’s shortsightedness in observing the separation and obviating the multiple failings of his father.
Although the director has tried several times in his work to dismantle the egocentric delusions of supposedly intelligent figures, he often fails in his undertaking (including another of his best films, ‘Marriage Story’) and fails to be as authentic as in this one. ‘A Brooklyn Story’ presents genuine writing and manages to make it interesting from the direction, both in the attention to detail and in how it approaches the actors (all of them splendid).
is a where the humor enters very cleanly, where he offers the viewer moments that he can observe himself and draw his own conclusions. The look of his divorce is not sweetened or overly dramatic.
It is also ahead of all the phenomenon of directors looking at their childhood in a film, with the added factor of having made it at a younger age (35 years) that avoids a nostalgic element that would have tarnished the whole. It is, in short, his best movie.