When will Noah Baumbach take a risk and stop making the same damn movie?

Almost two weeks ago, Noah Baumbach’s newest film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), released in a handful of theaters. If you were either not living in New York or Los Angeles, or, like me, too poor to pay $15 dollars for a movie ticket (plus $5.50 for NYC’s less than punctual transportation services), you had the option of watching the film on Netflix (the film is a Netflix original), which I did.

Broken up into three segments, The Meyerowitz Stories is a dramatic-comedy about three siblings and their relationship with their very critical, bitter, “kind of a prick” father. The oldest is Danny (Adam Sandler, who for the first time this decade delivers a decent performance), hobbling in middle age both literally and figuratively as he walks with a bad leg and is recently separated; Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), the middle child, is the child who has always been on the outside looking in when it came to her family; and Matthew, the youngest (Ben Stiller), a child from another marriage, who is a successful business manager living in L.A and is having family troubles of his own. Their father is Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman), a sculptor whose career peaked when he sold one of his pieces to the Whitney Museum (the event happening so long ago the museum can’t seem to find the piece in storage). Never reaching the heights of his contemporaries, he taught for decades at Bard College and is now retired, living with his alcoholic fourth wife Maureen (Emma Thompson) in New York City.

Sadly, this is one of those Baumbach films that does not feature Greta Gerwig, his wife and collaborator (who has her own film, her directorial debut Ladybird, releasing next month). Her absence is always a downer when it comes to recent Baumbach movies — Frances Ha and Mistress America, the two films they’ve collaborated on, are two of Baumbach’s strongest — because Gerwig provides a youthful energy both visually and on the page. Thankfully, even without her presence, The Meyerowitz Stories is a good movie, the best non-Gerwig film since The Squid and The Whale. The writing here is sharp, there are some real funny moments (one word, “Pagina Man”), the acting from top to bottom is very good (even if Sandler is not as good as critics are making him out to be), and it’s a movie I would easily recommend to someone wanting to watch something besides old episodes of The West Wing and Friends. However, besides my disappointment at this being a non-Gerwig Baumbach, the one criticism I have of The Meyerowitz Stories is that it’s safe, it’s so damn safe.

Having seen most of Baumbach’s filmography (never seen Margot at The Wedding and cut off Greenberg 30 minutes in because it’s boring), his films are always based around white people trying to deal with life, most of them doing it in NYC and by “NYC,” I mean parts of Manhattan, and in his recent films, gentrified Brooklyn. While watching this movie, I wondered if Baumbach has ever stepped foot on a triple digit New York City street corner in his life — I know he shot parts of Margot at The Wedding in City Island (thanks IMDB), which is up in the Bronx, but that’s so close to Westchester County it barely counts. Now before the loyalists come after me, I know that Frances Ha ends with Frances moving to an apartment in Washington Heights, but since we never see her outside the building, Baumbach could have filmed that anywhere.

As far as his characters go, I really do get it, stories about white people trying to figure things out is what Baumbach feels he’s good at. However, as a viewer, I’m left wondering when will this guy, who has been making movies for over two decades now, just take a risk and stop making the same damn movie. By no means am I just implying that he’s the only one guilty of doing this, many will go on the record to say all of Wes Anderson films are the same (they would be wrong), the same goes for the person Baumbach gets compared to the most, Mr. Woody Allen. It isn’t really smart to say anything positive about Allen these days (especially after his comments about a certain disgraced, now former Hollywood executive), however Allen didn’t just make movies about Jewish people living in Manhattan for his entire career; he perfected it and stretched himself creatively. The same goes for other filmmakers who are associated with and have made a substantial amount of films in NYC; filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and James Gray to name a few.

Now the last thing I want is for the Baumbach version of Do the Right Thing, because Baumbach perhaps just can’t write that story, and that’s fine, he shouldn’t push himself to do so, because otherwise he could easily get himself into very problematic territory. But when I re-read this piece in Variety about Baumbach’s “New York State of Mind,” I just wince when I read this line: “there may be no more quintessentially New York filmmaker of Generation Y than Baumbach,” because to me, by “Generation Y,” or Millennials as we are referred to, that means white people who moved to Brooklyn to open avocado bars.

I know it maybe hard to believe for some, but there still are people living in New York City who do not work or live anywhere near lower Manhattan or Brooklyn. Some of us, like Baumbach himself, are natives of this glorious, hellish, beautiful and frustrating city. We live in Harlem, Queens, Staten Island and yes, The Bronx. While Mayors like Giuliani and Bloomberg made the city safer, more accessible and overall easier for white kids from the suburbs to live out their How I Met your Mother or Girls fantasy life, the same can’t be said for those of us who had to go through the darker years of this city and didn’t get to live middle class or working class lifestyles nor take advantage of this new, trendy New York City.

Again, not looking for Baumbach to force himself to write something completely out of his comfort zone, however, from someone who says he knows the city so well, I think it’s about time he tells a story about the people of the city who don’t look or live like he does. It’s not like film festivals around the world would automatically shun a new Noah Baumbach movie, or Netflix won’t toss money at him or the mostly white audience who come see him at Lincoln Center will turn away if he makes a movie about two middle aged minorities trying to keep their apartment on the Grand Concourse or in Jackson Heights or (gasp!) somewhere that’s not NYC. All I’m asking for here is for this filmmaker, whom I admire and genuinely find interesting to just, you know, take a risk.