While We're Young

It feels as if we're back in "Greenburg" territory with "While We're Young" made four years later, since we have the same writer and director (Noah Baumbach) and the same lead actor (Ben Stiller) playing a similar central character. This time, Stiller is Josh, married to Cornelia (Naomi Watts), a middle-aged married couple who find themselves hooking up with Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a couple in their twenties, who remind the older pair of the freshness and spontaneity of youth while he struggles professionally and she laments their inability to become parents.

The female roles are underwritten and, while Driver is good, this is really Stiller's film. The trouble is that he is such an irritating character, unable to complete a long-running project to produce a boring documentary and foolishly trying to recapture his lost youth. There are some funny scenes and situations, but this is an uneven work with a sequence at a hippy retreat proving particularly silly.

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.

Watching people realizing they're no longer young and hip naturally lends itself well to humor, drama, and self-examination, but the subject matter alone doesn't always naturally lend itself to a neatly formed story. The writer/director has to handle that part. Good thing this movie has Noah Baumbach.

Baumbach brings a knowing touch to this film, always seeming to strike a fitting balance between humor, drama, and analysis, all without ever feeling heavy handed or condescending. He allows his characters to show viewers the dichotomy of a young, idealistic (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) juxtaposed against the aging couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watt) who have lost a bit of luster but are a bit in denial about their quasi-happiness.

After the couples meet and become fast friends, it's the older couple who draws inspiration from the young. They slip right back into their own youthful beliefs about the world and how they should exist in it. Some of their thoughts are meaningful, while others are sappy and, well, juvenile. Despite recognizing the silliness of the young couple's lifestyle, like watching VHS tapes and listening to records just because, it's easy as a viewer to fall under their spell. Driver and Seyfried are effortlessly charming, and their exuberance and self-certainty make them appealing role models.

The epiphany about how to live life that the young couple gives to the older one is a little too easy and convenient. Something must be off. Baumbach was simply reeling us in, making us listen more closely as he continues his story.

This is where the most crucial part of the movie arrives, and it's the one Baumbach handles with less success. Just as the salient message of the movie should be coming into focus, the story instead veers swiftly towards a grumpy take on the ethics of documentary filmmaking.

The third act is a little unsatisfying, but it is certainly not enough to erase what is on the whole an intelligent, humorous and enjoyable movie.

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.

While We're Young is mainly about comparing between two current generations. A typical comedy would normally make it a silly opposition about which one is better, but the movie doesn't make that as a conflict at all. The movie is more concerned on how its main characters acknowledge that they're at the point of a mid-life and finding a way ignore that by interacting a younger crowd. It's simply engaging stuff, almost devoid from the common comedy movie formula until the third act went through some climax that feels different from its more sincere setup, but even with that conventional turn, the film continues to be clever and sticks to its whole theme.

It starts with the childless main couple beginning to realize their age and almost makes a big deal about it until they discover how youth today actually live their lives after befriending with a younger couple and try to exchange each other's medium and lifestyle from the time they grew up with. The most typical way to treat this idea is to aim their new behavior for laughs or go against the other generation, but the movie rather takes it simple by just having them tag along with both of their interests. It may not be too sensational, but it gives a pleasantly charming feel within those interactions. There is still a sense of division between the generations, like how their peers couldn't relate to their new appeal. It kind of jokes about how odd cultures have gone, but the movie doesn't want to be too critical about it either and remains understanding both sides, anyway.

There is also a side story that involves their work as filmmakers of documentary and the movie still explores its main idea by showing how even the ethics of their industry have changed. And this leads to a third act that often exists in generic comedies, but the movie doesn't take those sequences as a punchline. Though, most of that part feels like it's shifting into a whole new topic, but as it turns out, it actually tries to build up a more reasonable contrast between the perspectives of the young and the old. When you think it's going to be in a clichéd direction, it's the writing that keeps things authentic. The acting are thoroughly natural on what they do. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are as likable as always, while Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried bring the charm in their characters.

While We're Young is pretty likable, even when it leads to a weirdly contrived conclusion, but either way, it still works, thanks to its genuinely charming performances and smart writing that has the right intention. The characters are rather fascinated at these hobbies and things that are popular from each other's generations, than making it a serious competition for themselves. But it still concerns at a person's mindsets and change of attitude due to age, which somehow becomes the actual conflict of the story. In the end, it finds a good heart anyway, and it's quite interesting to just see the distinction, but also the similar appeal between these featured generations.