The New Yorker Radio Hour - Noah Baumbach’s Unhappy Families

Episode Date: November 21, 2017

In his review of “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane paraphrased no less an author than Leo Tolstoy. “All happy families are alike,” Lane wrote, but “every unhappy family, in its own way, belongs in a Noah Baumbach movie.” In films like “The Squid and the Whale” and “Margot at the Wedding,” Baumbach shows a particular feel for family dynamics, and for characters who are messed up and exasperating but feel as real as the people around you. “The Meyerowitz Stories” stars Dustin Hoffman as an artist long past his prime, and Adam Sandler as one of his sons. Sandler’s character has moved back home to his father’s house, and, though the world might judge him a failure, his relationship with his own daughter redeems him. Noah Baumbach talked with The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison about how families judge success and failure. Plus, Erica Jong talks about her relationship with her grandfather, their visits to the American Museum of Natural History (across the street from their apartment building), and how his devotion to her in her childhood gave her the confidence to succeed as a writer. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. She's subconsciously mocked that lineage. So that's happening? It seems like an incredible story here on many fronts. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

In his review of the Myrowitz stories, new and selected, film critic Anthony Lane paraphrased no less an author than Leo Tolstoy. Anthony wrote, all happy families are alike. Every unhappy family, in its own way, belongs in a Noah Baumbach movie. As a writer and director, Boundback's got a particular feel for family dynamics and for characters who are incredibly messed up and exasperating, but there is real as the people around you. We've seen it in movies like The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding.

The Myrowitz Stories stars Dustin Hoffman as an artist long past his prime, and Adam Sandler plays one of his sons, and all three Myra Witch children are in the movie, each of them miserable in his or her own way. Noah Baumbach came into the office recently and sat down with the New Yorker's Susan Morrison, and they started out by talking about Baumback's history with the magazine. You just talked about your time being a messenger here,

And that was part of this sort of old golden age of the New Yorker before faxes and email. And tell us what that gig entailed. Was it a little glamorous? It was, I think it was a summer between my sophomore and junior year. And I was at Vassar. And it was just the best job. We would come in every morning and there would be all the newspapers. So we would read all the newspapers.

And we'd sit there and we'd all just talk. And there was a lot of. of downtime. So I would also like to start trying to write things. And there was typewriters. And Bruce, who ran the messenger room, you know, every so often then would like point at you and you would get a, you know, a certain amount of money to go, take, you know, generally proofs to one of the writers. There was Andrew Porter was uptown. Arlene Crotie was in Brooklyn. So you didn't really want to go to Arlene Crotie's in Brooklyn, I assume. No, because we got less money for that, because the idea was it was cab money, and we would then all just take the subway or walk,

and then we would pocket the rest as sort of a tip. Well, I think this is, especially editing and writing, it's something you can really, you really can learn a fair amount by osmosis, you know, just being around these people and listening to the editorial conversations, and that sounds like a great gig for a college kid. when I first heard that your grandfather, Harold Baumbach, was an artist like the character Dustin Hoffman plays in the Myraward stories. I looked him up online and there's a Times obit of your grandfather that uses a very striking phrase. It says that Baumberg was allergic to success, which is such an amazing thing to have in an obit. And it occurred to me, wow, that could have been a great alternate title to know as much.

movie. Because everybody in the movie is struggling with this idea of what it is to be successful. Obviously, Harold Marowitz doesn't think he's been successful enough. And his two sons, one played by Adam Sandler, is not conventionally successful, but he views himself as a successful parent. And his half-brother, Ben Stiller, is successful at making money, but doesn't seem to be successful at any kind of human relationships. I'm not splitting the time like I did at 15.

It was very important to me after our separation that I see you half the time. I wanted to make it up after Danny and Gene. And make it up to them. I made a real effort with you. Danny and Gene, I could have done better. I don't see anything significant. I could have been better with you.

Really? Nothing. Oh, come on, Matthew. You feel like that all was great. Danny definitely got shit and Gene didn't even get shit. But I got your focus. And that fucked me up in a whole other way. Matthew, we never see each other.

Let's not fight. I keep thinking I know how to handle you now, but then I see you and I get suckered into your shit all over again, your career, your jacket, and then when I try to actually help, like today, you won't listen. I don't see how I can do such a bad father. Look how successful you are. Right.

I could never be the businessman that you are. Okay. I've said to Marina, I don't know who Matthew takes after. I certainly didn't know how to make money. That's right. I don't take after you. None of us do. You had to be the only artist in the family. And it doesn't matter that I make money

because you don't respect what I do. Do you need my respect for the world respect? Because you make money. I want to put you in the nose. I know you think you can treat me this way because of your money. I mean, talk about success and what you're trying to say about it in this movie. Well, it's interesting. Actually, to think about allergic to success.

And I'm not sure who came up with that phrase. But allergies, by definition, it means it's out of your control, I guess, in some ways. And I would maybe, it almost takes away the response. responsibility from him, you know, as if he, you know, was cursed in some way, as opposed to somebody who was more self-destructive. And, but I think in some ways that goes into the Dustin's character in the movie, I think, is, feels in some ways that there is some, you know, whether it's the cultures against him or it's the wrong moment or, you know, the critics or whatever it is at any given moment that's not going his way. way is keeping him down as opposed to, you know, figuring out what his role in all of this is. But the movie itself, I think, I felt was sort of about how we, in ways that we define success, you know, and ways families kind of set the bar in a way, you know, either implicitly or

explicitly and and leave it to us to sort of measure ourselves by these standards. And, you know, as you say, in the movie, you know, being a good parent isn't really valued by Harold, by Dustin's character. Making money is not even really valued. And it's really, it's, it's all put on art. Right, right. And none of his kids feel that there's any room for them to be artists. It's something that only he can win at, you know. He can win in the family if he feels like he's losing in the outer world. Right. So even though he professes in the movie to be disappointed that none of his children are artists, there's really no way he could have ever allowed them to be.

Right. Now, the title of the movie is the Myrowitz stories, new and selected. And obviously, you're playing with the idea of a short story collection here. But as I watched it, I kept thinking the movie also shows that each character has a story that he insistently tells himself over and over almost to survive as consolation. Were you thinking about that as you put the movie together? Yeah, how these stories are both, they become, in the case of Harold, they're soothing. He goes to, you know, L.J., his contemporary, who's got a, who's very successful and has a retrospective at MoMA.

And afterward, he has to put LJ down and he kind of goes through this whole thing of what's wrong with the work and why it's popular but not really interesting. And I always saw those things. That was my direction to Dustin in a lot of cases was you're soothing yourself. You're going into a kind of rhythmic loop that is very available to you. You know, you have the words for it. Ultimately, LJ is a popular but minor artist. There's a superficial bravora, but there's no unconscious, no discovery. I know you like the bears, but it's a reshuffling of obnoxious clichés by listening to music quite slightly off-key.

I didn't get to see it. And the video work is embarrassing. I've never forgiven L.J. for using Loretta in those pieces. You don't do that to a child. And it's a disturbing commentary on the culture that truly ordinary work, made mostly by his assistance, gets reverent reviews from the critics. Who ought to know better? He's a talented, pretentious enigma. Let me see if there's a cat.

It's also something I'd wanted to do in a movie for a long time, and I've tried it and never found the right context for it, which is to repeat stories, have people tell the same story over again and actually have to, like, sit through it again, or tell the same joke again as well. And this became a great way to do it because it's what we all do in families anyway. people every year you gather around. Somebody's telling the same story again. And you're both like telling the history of the family and it kind of can bring people together. But it also can become total obfuscation and changing the narrative. It's interesting in the movie how a lot of these stories that we hear characters repeat

over and over again, they're actually wrong. Right. And this is the character's attempt to rewrite history so that in some cases so they don't feel so guilty. But these wonderful repeated bits, which is something we all know from our own loved ones, you know, hearing the same joke. It's what gives these characters such a lived-in kind of feeling, I think. Another thing about these characters and their stories is, well, all of your movies are, I think, as being full of fast-paced dialogue. But what is new in this one is the way characters talk over each other and past each other. None of them are actually

connecting. It almost seems like some kind of dissonant jazz where the melodies never intersect. And again, that's so realistic. And yet, I can't think of another movie where the dialogue works that way. Can you? Were you inspired by anyone else? Something like His Girl Friday in a way is maybe be like the closest thing. Yeah, another one of my directions is faster, because I do find that the writing or my writing works better faster. I noticed that when I remember starting out, and sometimes you do like a speed through,

like where you're, you know, let's just say it as, you know, let's speed through it as fast as we can or something. And I always felt like, well, that should be the movie is the speed through, not when we're actually acting it. We should do the speed through. And so I've kind of designed them more that way, I guess, as I've gone. And, you know, a lot of the, if you read the scripts, it's a lot of overlapping dialogue. And it's sort of like what you say is actually, because you were saying it's sort of like jazz, but also very realistic.

But somehow when we do it, if we do it right, it simulates reality. But to get there is completely. completely artificial. Well, you're known as a director who expects his actors to read every line in the script verbatim. And I'm thinking about your cast here, if Dustin Hoff and Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, all people who are known for improvising. Was that a challenge to get them to stick to what was on the page? Not in this case. They were all up for what this was, you know. And Ben, of course, had worked with me before, so he knew. But the problem is if people start adding things, even if they start adding ums and your nose or things that are, you know, might might on the face of it make it sound more natural for them. It just sounds wrong to me. It throws the whole thing off. Yeah, it does. And so it's not out of any kind of, you know, stubbornness or this feeling that I feel like, oh, well, what I've done is better than, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's more like this is the way I know how to do it. Now, I read one critic who said, was commenting how fantastic Adam Sandler can be when he's not acting in an Adam Sandler movie. I mean, Sandler's incredible. I hope he's nominated for an Oscar for Myrott's stories. But your influence as a director is obviously really, I mean, you can see it. He gives a very different kind of performance than he does in his other comedy movie. how do you account for that or what's your technique with someone like that? Well, it was really, you know, it's all there.

He's an extremely warm, sensitive person. And I would say the only like hurdle we had in rehearsals was me giving him permission in some ways to be funny, to be himself. I think like when we first started, he was reading it. It was very good, but it was... More tragic? Yeah, it felt a little like... Also, it also felt like he was holding back in some way because I think he was trying not to...

You know, he didn't want to mess it up. I think he felt a kind of responsibility. He didn't want it to be, you know, maybe in his head like an Adam Sandler character. But my feeling was it should have a relationship to that guy, you know? Right. In the My Root stories,

the character of Eliza, the college-age daughter of Adam Sandler's character, is a college-aged filmmaker. And it seems to me that she's the only character in the movie who doesn't seem ashamed. She does her work wholeheartedly without conflict. And it's almost a redemption, I think, of the whole Myowitz line of everybody being so tormented. Jean, that's you with the rabbit. You're going to miss it. Kiss, slap. Something changed inside me that day.

The end? Gene, you were so good. She's got real chops. I was well-headed. That's wonderful, honey. I don't know that I've seen a sexine shot quite like that before. I used deliberately very harsh, direct light. I wanted to appear very unattractive.

Wonderful Mizant. For my Jeopardy parody I did at my office, we just had to use the overhead flight. Overhead fluorescence. Yours had wonderful Misan Santa as well, Gene. Thanks. And this is your best yet, Eliza. Thanks, Dad.

I've made eight more since then. I'm in five of them. And she's also the only person in the movie who was really taken care of. Do you view her as this redemptive look into the future? Yeah. And a result of Danny's true success as a parent that he, was the buffer between all this stuff, you know, all the sort of legacy of his, of his father. And, you know, whatever pain it's caused him, he didn't pass it on to her.

And, yeah, and I thought just that, that she's unashamed. and that, you know, art making is not complicated for her. She's just doing it. You know, she's just, she's doing it and she's going to keep doing it. And it's not, you know, with a goal in mind or, you know, she's not, it's just not, she's not hampered by all this other Meyerwitz stuff. Now, you shot this movie on film, the movie's being distributed by Netflix. I saw it on the big screen.

I urge all of everyone at home to see it on a big screen. But do you have any anxiety or misgivings about the idea that a lot of people are going to watch it on a small screen or on a computer? Well, I feel the same way. I mean, I think, you know, I made the movie independently, and I wouldn't know how to not make it for a big screen. I mean, I think that's so much of why I make movies in a way, too. You know, I just think it's such a singular, unique, important experience seeing a movie in a theater, I do, I think,

and there's something about having an emotional experience with other people, communal experience. In a big, dark room. And that, you know, you're vulnerable in a different way than you are sitting at home with your feet up and, you know, pausing it to go, you know, pour another glass of wine or whatever. Having your phone buzz.

Yeah. I just realized that as we've been asking, analyzing all of the details of this family dynamic and the, you know, Tolstoy's unhappy families that were making it sound incredibly grim. This is actually one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long, long time, so I just want to make sure that gets across. Writer and director Noah Baumbach talking with New Yorker editor Susan Morrison. Boundbach's movie The Myrowitz Stories, new and selected, is out now on Netflix and in theaters. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Thanks for joining us. I'm David Remnick. And here is Erica John. We're sitting on Central Park West and 78th Street, and we're right near the Museum of Natural History. And we came here because I grew up right in this area. I grew up in a building facing the Museum of Natural History. And in some ways it was the same,

but in many ways it was different. Zhang is the author of a dozen books of fiction plus works of nonfiction and a poetry. But none's more famous than her debut from 1973, Fear of Flying. A story about a woman coming to terms with her zipless sexuality, and it was quite controversial at the time. The book reflects Zhang's own life and her upbringing and identity as a native of New York City. You always see tourists coming out of buses and going to the museum, sort of with stars in their eyes.

And I try to figure out where they're from. And you can sometimes tell, but often you can't. Very rarely do you see anyone wearing a sari or a kimono. Everybody is homogenized. That's sort of disappointing in a way. My grandfather, because he was a painter, and worked at home, and we all lived together in one of the same.

of these studio buildings with North Light on the other side of the museum. My grandfather often used to take me into the museum on the 77th Street side, and there was a hollowed wood canoe, and the light was kept very low in the museum. And I would look up at the canoe with the shadowy figures and become terrified. And Papa said, don't be seen. scared, but the figures, you couldn't see their faces. I know how important grandparents can be. They have more time for you than your parents. They have time to sort of wander with you and go to museums and travel with you. They gave me so many things that became part of my understanding of life. The Museum of Natural History was also very massive.

to me because I knew that in one of the turrets, Margaret Mead worked. She had her office here, and I always used to see Margaret Mead walking along Central Park West carrying a staff that had been given to her by some groups she studied. She really understood what it meant to be a woman who wanted children, children, but also wanted to make her work primary. And in one of her memoirs, I think it was Blackberry, Winter, she said, I went to the library and I looked up all the women I admired. And she said, and I noticed that each of them had one child. And I decided I could do that. And when I got

pregnant with Molly, my daughter, I thought, if Margaret Mead could do it, and I was, I was, I and go on with her work, so can I. This is too funny. Little kids, like three and four, pushing each other in a stroller. Fast, fast, okay. This has always been a neighborhood for kids. We used to call it the Planetarium Park.

God knows what the real name is. It surrounds the planetarium. There's plenty of greenery for kids. kids to run around on. And maybe that's the good thing about this neighborhood, that there's so many places for children to play. We're on 77th Street, West 77th Street, which is the street where I grew up. The building I grew up and had been built at the turn of the 20th century as a building for artists. my grandfather painted portraits and movie posters for MGM, and I painted by his side. As a little girl, I was supremely confident, and I think my confidence came from the fact that I was adored by my grandfather and my father.

I never come here without thinking of myself as a child, but perhaps the best part of it was when my three grandchildren from Molly, my daughter Molly Zhang Fas, were little. I brought them to the museum all the time. The great thing about being a grandparent is you see your childhood reimagined through the eyes of your grandchildren. I mean, they teach you about the world and you teach them about the world.

It's the great reward for getting older, really. Look at these marvelous hydrangeas. Dranges. They're in the museum park. They're the... Ah! So it's called Margaret Mead Green. I thought it was called

the Planetarium Park, but it's been renamed Margaret Mead Green. Good for her. The novelist and poet Erica Jong in Manhattan. I'm David Remnick. Thank you for joining me this week. I hope you enjoyed the show. And next week, Bruce Springsteen, join.

us. Have a great Thanksgiving. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Churina Endowment Fund.