How ‘Barbie’ and Greta Gerwig Taught Noah Baumbach How to Have Fun

On one of those really good New York days in late September, the writer and director Noah Baumbach was wandering the upper floors of the Whitney Museum, trying to explain what his new movie was about. This is something that Baumbach generally struggles with, perhaps because it lies so closely to his gift, which is rendering the way people lie to themselves about themselves, the way they talk around the truth. “I find it difficult to say anything kind of absolute about what I’m doing or what I’ve made,” Baumbach said.

Looking back, he said, things were often clearer. He told a story about visiting his father’s father, a painter, in Brooklyn, when Baumbach was a child. “We would go up to the top floor, which was his studio, and he would show us the new work,” Baumbach said. “As a kid I was impressed by my father, who always had things to say about them that seemed smart to me, but now I can only imagine what he was going through every time.” Baumbach winced, thinking of what it must have cost his father to play along. “My grandfather would put one up and say, ‘I think this one’s a masterpiece’ …‘I’m doing the best work in my life.’ ”

This scene made its way, close to verbatim, into 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories, in which Dustin Hoffman played a sculptor whose self-involvement and bad feelings about his own career has wrecked his relationship with his three children. Simple enough. But could Baumbach—who once told an interviewer that “I couldn’t write an autobiographical movie if I tried”—have admitted then, at the time, just how much of that film was about his father and his grandfather?

Several years ago, he remembered, while editing 2019’s Marriage Story—a film about a divorce not entirely unlike Baumbach’s own split with actor Jennifer Jason Leigh—he’d had the experience of rewatching his breakthrough, 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical account of Baumbach’s parents’ divorce and the kids stuck in between. The Criterion Collection was reissuing the film, so Baumbach watched it in its office, in a little editing bay, and found himself weeping in front of two company employees. “I was crying for myself, that kid whose parents got divorced and went through all of that,” he said he realized. “And also I was crying for myself, the adult who went through divorce. And I was also crying because I was proud of myself.”