Stiller waters run deep in 'Greenberg'

There are two Ben Stillers, at least.

One is the nutball comedic titan behind a couple of decades' worth of Hollywood hits: There's Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum, Tropic Thunder.

The other Stiller - like many who ply the comedy trade - is a darker soul. Back in 1994, Stiller directed and costarred in the essential Gen X disillusionment drama, Reality Bites. He was a desperate, drug-addicted TV scribe in Permanent Midnight. He's even done Neil LaBute, participating in the trademark misanthrope's '98 couples-fall-apart-fest, Your Friends & Neighbors.

In Greenberg, from filmmaker Noah Baumbach and out now in theaters, Stiller does a bit of both: Roger Greenberg, 40, is a New Yorker in L.A., trying to regain his equilibrium after a breakdown, trying to deal with old friends and figure out what to do with his life.

"It's funny how life sneaks up on you," says the star about playing this adrift and addled character. "There's no avoiding it when you get to a certain age. Wow, this has already happened? I'm at this point already?"

But then Greenberg meets his brother's and sister-in-law's personal assistant, played by Greta Gerwig, and the grumpy, disconnected guy and the bumblingly attractive twentysomething embark on a relationship. It's awkward and unsure. Not that funny, though there are moments.

Actually, come to think of it, Greenberg - like Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale - is less ha-ha than it is ouch-ouch. The humor is there: it's just black and acidic, like a dark roast at Starbucks.

"I always wanted somebody funny for this movie," says Baumbach in a separate interview. "It's not a traditional comedy, but it's a movie that read to me as funny. It's just not played funny, it's played authentically. . . .

"And I wanted an actor who could work on both planes. Somebody who could play this guy very close to the bone, really make it personal, but who has that other sense, that comic sense, running at the same time."

That would be, and is, Stiller, who persuaded Baumbach to rewrite the title character to make Greenberg - a failed musician, a carpenter, and a narcissistic mess - a decade older.

"I felt too old for it when Noah first gave me the screenplay, so I told him why, and he went back and did another draft that really spoke to that," says Stiller. "It was interesting, the rewrite, because it wasn't specifically what we had talked about, but it changed his thinking on what the movie was about, and I think it got a little more accessible, actually.

"Because I think a character like Greenberg at 30 is a little less sad than at 40. It's a bleaker landscape."

For Stiller, 44, Roger Greenberg is one of those "there but for the grace of God go I" guys.

"I have regrets, mistakes that I've made, relationships that I've screwed up, all that stuff, but I've also been lucky enough to have other, more positive things happen in my life since to temper that," he says, on the phone from New York. "You still can look back and go, 'Gosh I should have done this,' or 'I should have done that,' but it's easier when you have love in your life and friends and successes. . . .

"And unfortunately, for Greenberg, he doesn't. And I know people like that . . . talented people, good people, who have not had the breaks, or they put up their own internal blocks in life, these flaws, that have made it harder for them to get where they want to be."

So Stiller empathized with his character. It shows in the mix of hurt and irony in his voice, in Greenberg's hunched, nervous stance, in the lost looks he throws around between the wisecracks.

"What's great about what Noah wrote is that he put that out there for people who have experienced these struggles in life, the day-to-day struggles that you don't usually see in movies," Stiller says.

"You see movies about cops that are fighting corruption, or sword and sorcery movies, kill the dragon - obvious, heroic stuff - but the nature of the struggle of just getting through the day without going crazy, or living with the mistakes you made or the little minor humiliations of life, and having to keep your ego intact, those are things you don't see so often."

Then again, you don't see a male model-turned-brainwashed assassin very often, either. In an 180-degree turn from the keenly observed, cutting character study of Greenberg, Stiller is preparing to reprise his role as Derek Zoolander in a sequel to the 2001 comedy.

"I've been wanting to do it for years," says the actor, who's working with his Tropic Thunder cowriter and pal, Justin Theroux, on Zoolander 2. "But Drake Sather, who created the character, is no longer alive, and that's always been like a tough thing for me, to figure out how to do it without him. But I think we've finally got an idea."

So, from Roger Greenberg, not that funny, to Derek Zoolander, ridiculous.

"But they're not completely unalike," Stiller says of these two characters, laughing just a bit. "They're both self-obsessed. They've just had very different life experiences."

'Girl' sequels. With The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo performing exceptionally well in U.S. art houses (it's on two screens at the Ritz in its second week of release), Music Box Films has snapped up distribution rights for the follow-up adaptations of Stieg Larrson's mega-selling Swedish thrillers. The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest - both, like Dragon Tattoo, starring the riveting Noomi Rapace as angry computer-hacking Stockholm punkette Lisbeth Salander - will be released later this summer. The late Larrson's Hornets' Nest book gets published stateside in May.

And producer Scott Rudin is busy hatching plans for an English-language remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, with Steve Zaillian (Schindler's List, American Gangster) doing the screenplay, David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) said to be keen to direct, and the likes of Carey Mulligan and Kristen Stewart being talked about to play Ms. Salander. (Stewart, in an interview last week, says she hasn't been approached, but she loves the book.)

Movie

Greenberg

In area theaters