Review: While We're Young

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★★

Very few filmmakers are able to correctly capture the essence of living in modern Middle America. Noah Baumbach is one of those filmmakers. And while the main characters of his latest feature “While We’re Young” are living comfortably well in New York City, they still face all the same issue everyone of us – rich and poor – must face: getting older.

Ben Stiller stars as Josh, a middle-aged documentary filmmaker married without children to Cornelia (Naomi Watts). Despite not having any kids, Josh and Cornelia have fallen into a slump of only going to one event whenever they have a night out and a general lack of spontaneity. Josh has taken almost 10 years to complete his latest movie and it’s still not done. But all this changes when Josh meets a young couple while giving a less-than-stellar lecture about film at one of the local universities. Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried) are a couple of hipsters living life as simple – or maybe as ironic – as possible. Jamie is a wannabe filmmaker while Darby makes her own ice cream. In a social setting, they’d rather just not know the answer to a question that comes up during conversation rather than Google the answer on their phone.

Suddenly, Josh and Cornelia are energized hanging around these two. They see how much fun life can be when you just live life without worrying about a need to find success. Of course, everyone does have desires in life, and Jamie’s desire is to be a documentarian much like Josh, and even more so like Josh’s legendary documentarian father-in-law Leslie (Charles Grodin). Jamie wants Josh’s help putting together a very ill-conceived idea for a film. Josh has never been a great collaborator before, but he’s willing to give it shot for once in his life. For the first time in a long time, Josh feels young and untouchable again.

Of course, not everyone in Josh and Cornelia’s life sees their new found youthfulness as attractive. Longtime friends and first time parents Marina (Maria Dizzia) and Fletcher (Adam Horovitz aka Ad-Rock of Beastie Boys fame) don’t understand this newfound interest in people in their early-to-mid twenties. Why can’t Josh and Cornelia just have a kid and act their age? Because walking the abandoned tracks of a subway line for no purpose whatsoever is much more fun.

“While We’re Young” is an honest look at the lives people of two different generations are living now. There may be a certain level of jealousy from each group toward the other, but none of it should be detrimental. The film chooses to not explore the realities of getting older, but rather the purpose of evaluating where you are in your life every now and then.

Baumbach sets up his story perfectly in the beginning, and keeps his short and fast paced script on theme for the remainder of the film. We should come to expect no less from him at this stage in his career. He continues to turn out well-written films time and time again. It would also appear that “While We’re Young” could be slightly autobiographical for him to an extent. After all, he always surrounds himself with talent younger than he is, like the impeccable Greta Gerwig in his 2013 feature “Frances Ha.” She’s absent in this film, but he makes do without her.

Here, Baumbach casts exceptional younger talent in Driver and Seyfried and pairs them with veterans like Watts and Stiller. (I’ll still refer to Seyfried as “young talent” despite her being in mega productions for over a decade now.) Stiller especially shines here. He turned in one of the best performances of his career with another Baumbach film “Greenberg” but tops that here. The scenes and moments that Driver and Stiller share are exceptional, especially in moments where Stiller provides terrific reaction to the interesting situations he finds himself in with his younger counterpart.

“While We’re Young” has a moving message, but it’s cleverly buried inside a story that is filled with so much genuine humor that it never feels forced. And of course Baumbach’s brilliance is on full display as usual. It’s a film that moves along quick, complete with characters full of empathy. Each viewer should find something familiar in at least one of the main roles. It’s a very enjoyable film and is truly funny. It may lack the masterful stroke as some of Baumbach’s previous work (see “Frances Ha”) but it’s still a very smart comedy about people trying to live their lives in the face of growing old. We may grow older everyday, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to slow down our lives just because of an arbitrary number known as age.