A chaotic and completely accurate ranking of Noah Baumbach movies
From his no. 1 fan
It is my birthday week, which I have spent doing exactly what I want. Apparently, what I want is to give you this.
Noah Baumbach is one of my favorite directors. I know how that sounds. For a while, claiming him as a favorite felt defensible and incriminating, like admitting Jonathan Franzen is your favorite novelist. I actually do like Franzen, but that’s for another issue. Baumbach makes a cinema of discomfiture that doesn’t age out. His characters are artists and intellectuals who are plagued with feelings of being spiritually older or younger than they actually are, sometimes both in the same scene. Almost always New Yorkers and often beset by creative dilemmas (to steal/appropriate or not to), they speak sharply, eloquently, and truly, which is harder to achieve than it looks. Their souls, beneath all the talk, are often encoded with sadness. I love all characters and films to some degree, some probably for the wrong reasons.
In other news:
RIP to Tony Stella, graphic designer, illustrator, and movie poster artist extraordinaire.
If you’re going to the movies this weekend: reminder that Wallace Shawn has done a lot more than The Princess Bride. No shade.
Anthony Bourdain, are you a good buy or a bad guy?
At the Screen Slate gala, rub elbows with NYC cinema’s finest: John Wilson, Ari Aster, me, and other esteemed writers of the scrappy publication/NYC institution. It’s for a good cause. Getting us paid, expanding programming, getting more recognition as a Serious and Worthy Non-profit, which it is. If that doesn’t convince you, perhaps Mark Ibold, bassist of Pavement, tending bar will!!!! Tickets and info here.
Now, the rankings. Tell me your favorite in the comments.
13. HIGHBALL
“Everybody Felix.”
There’s a reason Baumbach released this one under a pseudonym. Made the same year Mr. Jealousy came out, it’s a scrappy hangout movie set at a 33rd birthday party, made on an ultra-low budget and shot as if the lights had gone out and someone resorted to flashlights. Populated by period-specific names like Ally Sheedy and Annabella Sciorra, it has Baumbach’s conversational drift but is not a fully formed work of the director, approaching something closer to Melvin Goes to Dinner and other Gen X ilk.
12. WHITE NOISE
“Don’t we deserve attention for our suffering?”
Baumbach takes existential dread mainstream with this larger-than-usual budget adaptation of the famous DeLillo novel. Showcasing what might be the happiest couple in his oeuvre, White Noise, ironically, is the director’s most life-affirming movie in two decades. In fact, he imbues the movie with such buoyancy that it culminates in a supermarket song-and-dance set to LCD Soundsystem (at the time of release, their newest single in five years) and, inarguably, the best part of the movie.
No one, absolutely no one, is saying this is their favorite Baumbach movie. Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver are goofy; the kids retain the talkiness he’s known for, and it’s overall saved from being completely a loss as it proves Baumbach can stage a set piece, one that tees him up for Jay Kelly.
