While We're Young

This film tells the story of a documentary filmmaker who has had success but struggles to finish his new documentary. He meets a young and energetic couple who live life colourfully, and he gets infected by their unending enthusiasm.

"While We're Young" starts off very strong, with Josh and Cornelia having a sort of midlife crisis. Passion dwindles from their lives, and they get locked into their comfort zone. The couple is charming and infectiously happy. I think many people could identify with Josh and Cornelia. I certainly could. I was hoping the story of unfold along these lines, but as things go wrong, it seems almost wrong for Josh and Cornelia to rediscover themselves. I think it's a misfired message, and I identify with the story less towards the end. Nonetheless, it's a good film.

Getting older is an odd business. We know it happens to us, every day, every month, every year. And yet, it also sneaks up on us. Suddenly, we're the oldest people in the room, with the most out-of-date vocabulary, squinting and fussing when once we used to laugh and shrug it all off. Our zest for life is rapidly depleting, and time is running out. Writer-director Noah Baumbach's While We're Young is a wise, witty look at a couple caught in between generations - they're middle- aged, by any and all measures, but are still young enough to hear the siren call of reckless adventure and self-exploration. It's a shame that Baumbach's film winds up making a far less successful segue into the realm of a psychological semi-thriller.

Filmmaker Josh (Ben Stiller) has been in a state of arrested development for years. As his friends settle down with babies and careers, he's been making the same dense, complicated documentary for close to a decade, whilst his happy marriage to Cornelia (Naomi Watts) remains in the same gear as it has for ages. But Josh gains a new lease on life when he meets Jamie (Adam Driver) and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a free-spirited pair of twenty-something-year-olds who still sparkle with the possibilities of life, hope and renewal.

While We're Young is at its best when it makes thoughtful, sharp observations about aging. In the first half of the film, Josh rushes to keep up with his new young friends, dragging Cornelia along for the ride. Suddenly, they're shaken out of the rut of their lives, wearing jaunty hats, participating in mass spiritual retreats, and forcing their less flexible bodies into hip-hop classes. Baumbach skilfully juxtaposes this with Josh and Cornelia's increasing disenchantment with their old friends, Marina (Maria Dizzia) and Fletcher (Adam Horovitz), who are caught up in a frenzy of new baby worship. Baumbach's insights are nestled within his scenes and characters - tiny lines or moments will strike home for anyone who's felt out of place for age-related reasons.

What works less well is the moody semi-thriller (possibly titled Not Quite Single White Male) that Baumbach tries to graft onto his comedy about life and aging. It plays very well at first, as Jamie reveals himself to be - just like Josh - a documentarian, and one who - unlike Josh - seems to have everything work out perfectly at every step of the filmmaking process. It's a nice contrast, because it prompts Josh to keep questioning himself about whether he has, after all, squandered away his youth on something that was never meant to be.

However, Jamie's relationship with Josh takes on a more sinister tone as the film progresses. His intentions are called into question, with the shortcuts he takes and the friends he makes bordering on the questionable. It's good character work, to be sure, but ends up confusing rather than deepening the overall narrative. By the time Josh barrels toward an awkward showdown with Jamie, Baumbach seems to have forgotten the point he was making with the film in the first place.

Nonetheless, the film is a worthy vehicle for Stiller and Watts to really dig into their characters and relationship. It's nice to see Stiller really embrace a darker, deeper role that's not quite in his wheelhouse. He pulls it off very well indeed, lending great weight and an unexpected vulnerability to Josh's insecurities. Watts, too, relishes the part of Cornelia, one of the best-written roles in recent memory for a woman in her forties. The film may ultimately belong to Josh, but Watts' Cornelia isn't merely set dressing meant to evoke a life. She's a full-fledged person in her own right, tough and tender, with her own personal heartbreaks that make her the person we see in the film.

You wouldn't think it, given their wildly divergent career paths to date, but Stiller and Watts also share plenty of chemistry. He may be better known for comedy and she for drama, but it's evident here that they can each handle both with plenty of intelligence and polish. It's a delight, therefore, to watch them navigate the tapestry of their relationship, as Josh - fired by jealousy and paranoia - starts worrying at threads of it such that it begins to unravel before Cornelia's eyes. And yet, the fact that these two characters truly love and respect each other through it all is never in doubt.

Although While We're Young may not completely come together as a coherent whole, that doesn't detract from the quiet wonders of this smart, whimsical, bitingly real film. It's a pleasure to spend time with characters this real and rounded, to recognise in them the abandon of youth and the relative stability of age. In his offbeat way, Baumbach is warning us that trade-offs between the two may be less rigid than we have been taught to expect. Like the film itself, it's a welcome insight, one that's filled with both hope and maturity.

So I get what the film was aiming for, but I've gotta say, I'm incredibly shocked by its critical reception. I don't think it's "bad", really, but just thoroughly mediocre and really obnoxious. I don't know why, but something about it came off so incredibly forced and fake. It has some good acting and none of it is offensive or anything, but something about it annoyed me in a way I can't really pinpoint. I love Naomi Watts, but she was part of the problem. There just wasn't any synchrony between the performers I don't think. Either that or between their performances and the tone the film was aiming for. I'm perplexed because none of it I can really put my finger on, except that there is absolutely nothing of real note or anything that will be memorable even a day after watching it (well, that's not true, since I saw it a day ago). Not worth it

I saw the trailers for this, thought it looked funny and i like Stiller so gave it a whirl. What a mistake! This is not the comedy the trailers made it out to be, they show the best bits and when it came to watching the whole film it fell flat. This film was trying to be an intellectual dark comedy, maybe in the vein of Woody Allen but lacked the style, sophistication and plot. The mid life crisis thing, done many times before but better, the role reversal with the oldies doing the social media thing and the younger couple living like hippie bohemians felt like an attempt to be clever but just didn't feel real. The whole moral conscience thing Stiller had was muddled because of the way the plot didn't really make out that anyone had done anything very much wrong. This was deliberate but made the whole morality issue just too subtle for the audience to care. At the end i couldn't care less whether they had a baby together or not and found it all very irritating. I know it was supposed to be allegorical and therefore clever but to me at least it was just badly done and a bit pretentious.

Josh (Ben Stiller) is a documentary filmmaker at a crossroads in his career after having made a good debut feature. His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a producer with a famous father as a documentary filmmaker (Charles Grodin). Now crawling towards middle age, the couple seem unfulfilled somewhat, as they are unable to have a child, unlike most of their close friends.

Enter tyro filmmaker Jamie Fletcher (Adam Driver) and his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried), two twentysomethings who not only appear full of life, but seem willing to look up to Josh as an example of a competent filmmaker. Jamie embarks on his career, and never looks back.

Noah Baumbach's film has strong echoes of ALL ABOUT EVE, with the scheming Jamie trying every trick in the book to advance himself at Josh's expense, while pretending to be friendly. Yet WHILE WE'RE YOUNG manages to make some important points about the angst associated with middle age: Josh wants to be young once more, and is prepared to ape Jamie's mode of dress, as well as trying to enjoy the youngsters' leisure pursuits. Neither prove very satisfying for the older filmmaker, and in the end he comes to acknowledge the fact of growing old.

Yet Baumbach also has some trenchant points to make about the documentary filmmaker's art. Do they exist to record life around them - as Leslie (Grodin) claims in a climactic speech, or do they cut corners and fabricate life in search of a good story? What is a "good" story anyway? The film has great fun skewering some of Josh's more pretentious flights of fancy as he struggles to finish a six and a half hour documentary that has already taken him ten years. He has written something far too long and boring (it's clear that Baumbach would never be a fan of the work of Claude Lanzmann, whose SHOAH lasts almost the same length of time).

Yet Baumbach never lets the action get too serious. The script is full of witty lines, and the performances are cleverly drawn. The New York locations also provide an effective backdrop to the action, with the seedy filmmakers' studios contrasting with the opulence of Lincoln Center.