While We're Young

Noah Baumbach's urban comedy of manners While We're Young is the writer/director’s second stab at a mid-life crisis picture. Like his darker, more strident Greenberg (2010), the film stars Ben Stiller as a man in his forties who confronts his own lack of success through encounters with the younger generation. Like Greenburg’s follow up Frances Ha (2012), it also playfully examines the contemporary world of young, artistic, New York hipsters. In some ways the movie is a thematic hybrid of Greenberg and Frances Ha, but While We're Young is much more of a straight-up light comedy that aims to please rather then dig deep as a character study.

Stiller and Naomi Watts play married, well-heeled New Yorkers Josh and Cornelia. As their fellow fortysomething friends start having babies, Josh and Cornelia are drawn into New York’s vibrant youth culture via a hipster couple in their mid-twenties. Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried play Jamie and Darby, the married millennials whose seemingly open, carefree, DIY, attitude energizes and challenges Josh and Cornelia. 

Baumbach has a good deal of fun satirizing both generations while he investigates current, yet timeless, ideas about how age, community, and culture shape our perspectives. Like Josh, Jamie is a documentary filmmaker and much of the attitudinal differences between the generations are explored through how each of the characters perceives authenticity in non-fiction film and the artistic process.  In its questioning of the sometimes conflicting pursuits of happiness/success balanced with purity/integrity, We're Young recalls James L. Brooks Broadcast News (1987), one of my all time favorite films. It’s interesting to think that filmmakers (and much of society) are still heatedly wrestling with the issues that picture raised nearly 30 years ago. But Baumbach’s latest feature is not nearly as funny, insightful, or well constructed as Brooks’ masterpiece.  However, even though the storytelling in While We’re Young is sometimes clumsy and heavy handed, the satirical humor never becomes too broad to maintain credibility, and Baumbach and his talented cast recover quickly from the few missteps they take along the way.

It would be difficult for me not to relate to a story about a 43 year-old, unsuccessful filmmaker, in a loving, long-term, childless relationship, who is both enticed and repelled by the attitudes, ethics, and lifestyles of people twenty years younger than himself. This strong identification may cloud my judgment and make me overly forgiving of the film’s weaknesses. I don’t think twenty-somethings will find much to like in this movie, and cinephiles will be disappointed in its rather generic look, especially coming after the visually stunning Greenberg and Frances Ha. But While We're Young is intelligent and funny enough for me to recommend it.