NOAH BAUMBACH'S BIG BREAKTHROUGH

How Barbie and Greta Gerwig taught the guy who made Marriage Story how to have fun.

- By ZACH BARON

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?