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.

Review: Inside Llewyn Davis

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★★½

The latest from Joel and Ethan Coen is “Inside Llewyn Davis”, a look at the folk music scene in New York City in 1961, right before a certain young man began singing about how the answers, my friend, are blowin’ in the wind. The Coens film is a visually striking film, complete with memorable songs from industry legend T Bone Burnett and Mumford and Sons frontman Marcus Mumford. It also showcases the Brothers on the top of their game.

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a folk singer. He called Greenwich Village his home, even though he just lives on other people’s couches on a rotating basis. And if you ask his friend Jean (Carey Mulligan), Llewyn Davis is an asshole. That’s because she’s pregnant and it might be his. Of course, it might be Jim’s (Justin Timberlake), her boyfriend and musical collaborator (they’re a singing duo themselves, and quite popular). She wants Jim’s baby but not Llewyn’s. So she needs to terminate it just in case it isn’t Llewyn’s. Which is why he’s an asshole.

Llewyn’s songs are good. He has representation with a very small manager, Mel (Jerry Grayson), but doesn’t earn enough money from him. Llewyn was in a folk duo earlier in his career, but his counterpart committed suicide, leaving Llewyn alone to continue on as a solo artist. Llewyn has asked Mel to send his new solo record to a manager in Chicago named Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) who also runs his own club. He’s sure Bud will love his music and agree to manage him. He’s already set up Jim and Jean’s dorky friend Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) so how could he not like Llewyn?

After a recording session for an awful yet insanely catchy song that Jim wrote with Al Cody (Adam Driver), Llewyn decides to forgo the royalties and just take a lump sum check for the session right now. He ends up using the money to help pay for gas to ride along with one of Al’s friends, jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his valet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund) to Chicago. There, he hopes to catch the attention of Bud Grossman and become the biggest thing in folk music.

This is vintage Coen Brothers material, from the story to its structure to the well-crafted handling of the filmmaking itself. And it’s as close to a musical as we’ve seen from them, so of course the music is phenomenal as well. The Brothers have made a career making films about gritty people that don’t just despise one another, but they hate themselves too. Llewyn Davis is this kind of character. “Inside Llewyn Davis” closely remebles the tone of their earlier film “A Serious Man”. One centralized character that isn’t very likeable. You would think that formula would make for a chaotic film, and left to any other filmmaker, it probably would be. But the Coen Brothers are right at home with this type of subject.

Are you supposed to love him or hate him? The Brothers don’t really give us anything to love about him, except maybe his music. He’s rude to just about everyone he meets. He doesn’t really care about the feelings of Jean, who he may or may not have put in a troubling situation. Although he feels she’s partially to blame, but who says that in this situation? According to Jean, an asshole would. Which is what Llewyn is.

The Brothers take another snapshot of life with this story. Only this time, they focus entirely on one individual. Isaac is on screen for every scene of this film, and he’s only missing from a select few frames. He performs all the music as well. Isaac succeeds in brilliant fashion by playing a character no one likes, yet is still trying to gain some of your emotion in process. There are a few moments when I found myself empathizing with him only to be slapped back into reality by a brash comment in the following scene.

The rest of the cast is filled out with people who attempt to balance out Llewyn, but to little success. Mulligan is fantastic in her role as Jean, a woman with a sweet folky singing voice and a smile to make men’s hearts melt when she’s on stage singing. Off state, she’s an angry woman cursing like a sailor whenever she’s around Llewyn. Timberlake as Jim is also wonderful in the role (which is becoming somewhat of a consistent critique of Timberlake; the man can act). He’s nice and loveable like Jean is on stage, but off stage he carries the same mannerisms. He’s hopefully and optimistic about life in general, something not usually seen in characters from films about 1960s America.

Some of the best moments in the film come during Llewyn’s drive from New York to Chicago with Goodman and Hedlund. Goodman is a Coen staple appearing in well over a handful of their films. He’s just as loud and boisterous as ever. It’s almost as if the Coens write these roles specifically for him (which they probably do). He’s as memorable as his previous Coen characters like Gale Snoats, Charlie Meadows, Walter Sobchak and Big Dan Teague. Only this time, he clocks very little screen time. I wish he would have had a larger presence in this film, but it’s not his movie. This is all about Llewyn and how he interacts with the people who enter in and out of his life. Roland Turner is just another blip on the overall life of Llewyn Davis.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” might not be the Coen Brothers masterpiece, but it is certainly a fascinating looks at the folk music scene of the early 1960s and the people involved in it right before it became a hugely popular genre of music. To me, the story is meant to be a reflective look on everyone in the audience to see how you may or may stack up next to the ambitions of Llewyn Davis.

He’s not a nice guy, but he’s got a dream. He wants to make that dream come true. He’ll use people, abuse people and step on anyone who gets in his way. Every one of us has a dream. Llewyn’s just chasing after his. What’s so wrong with that? The issue is not what your dream is, but how you go about attaining it. Many people get to where they’re going without being rude. Llewyn doesn’t understand that. In the end, he gets exactly what he deserves: an actual and at the same time metaphorical kick in the gut. This is the appropriate and perfect ending for Llewyn, and the Coens give it to him in a very smart way.