While We’re Young
Written and directed by Noah Baumbach
Starring: Ben Stiller, Peter Yarrow, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin
Noah Baumbach’s films have always been wryly humorous and smart. But very few have been as psychologically penetrating, tender and poignant as his best and most personal work, the semi-autobiographical “The Squid and the Whale” (2005). “While We’re Young” may not delve as deep and create such complex characters as “The Squid….,” but it’s witty and rueful, and carries Baumbach’s unique personal voice: a comically self-involved and self-knowing one.
Its center is a once-promising, middle-aged, documentary filmmaker Josh Srebnick (Ben Stiller), who has been working for a decade amassing footage for an ambitious documentary that he can’t shape or finish. The documentary reminds us of the solemn film Woody Allen’s character was shooting in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which also included an interview with an aged intellectual. In Baumbach’s film it’s a historian played with charm by Peter Yarrow.
Josh is the kind of cineaste who can quote Godard, and allude to great documentarians like Wiseman, Pennebaker, and the Maysles as his models. But he is not only stuck in his work, but feels trapped by his life. He and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts whose attractive character remains undefined, and needs to be fleshed out) have chosen not to have kids. They find themselves separated from their best friends who have just had one and can’t stop talking about the experience of being parents. Josh and Cornelia may be unencumbered by children, but feel their lives and marriage has become stagnant and do little with their freedom.
A supposedly chance meeting with a young, liberated hipster couple, Jamie an aspiring documentarian and Darby, a maker of organic artisanal ice cream (a convincing, confident Adam Driver, and a barely registering, sweet Amanda Seyfried), makes clear to them how much they have aged. A clever montage contrasts the young couple playing board games, and Jamie’s nostalgically watching VHS cassettes and tapping on one of his vintage typewriters, as Josh and Cornelia in turn are wedded to their high tech devices.
Impulsively Josh and Cornelia foolishly try to adopt the younger couple’s way of life. They ride bikes, go to hip-hop dance classes, explore abandoned subway tunnels, and even spend time at a shaman’s absurd, drug-imbibing night where every one vomits out their guts. Some of the sequences can be sharply satiric of the fashionable young’s way of life, but the guru sequence is unfunny, and never-ending.
Viewing the younger couple as open and generous, and as also embodying a revivifying life force, Josh and Cornelia become totally enamored with them. Josh even volunteers to help Jamie make his documentary. His emotional neediness and Josh’s over-the-top flattery blinds him from observing what Jamie’s intentions truly are. However, Josh discovers belatedly Jamie is no free and open spirit, but the kind of hipster who uses him to get ahead. Much of Josh’s ensuing rage is justified, but some of it derives from his own sense of failure. His anger leads to a too long set piece at a gala for Cornelia’s father, an esteemed documentarian played with quiet authority and a touch of sarcasm by Charles Grodin, where Josh confronts Jamie.
Baumbach is sympathetic to Josh’s belief in artistic truth and authenticity but it’s hard to make the manipulative but strikingly alive Jamie into a villain. The film suggests he is part of a generation that has very flexible notions of truth — appropriating other people’s work and playing with what is true. Jamie may not be a person to befriend or be trusted, but he’ll get ahead in the artistic world, and Josh’s moral judgments have seemingly become anachronistic.
The film has its flaws, but in Josh, a blocked artist seeking to renew his life by rediscovering his youth, Baumbach has created a multidimensional, memorable character. And Stiller is a perfect fit for the role. He has a gift for playing tense, neurotic, competitive people, who are also victims, while simultaneously eliciting laughs.
In “While We’re Young” Baumbach has made a more mainstream comedy. It’s one that displays his keen insight into the comic/pathetic nature of human behavior, and a social intelligence that captures the absurdities and pain of the generational divide.
“While We’re Young” opens Friday, April 10 at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington. For showtimes, click here.
