While We're Young

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Noah Baumbach/Starring: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried and Charles Grodin

The anxieties of a childless middle-age couple and their heady re-visitation of youth is the narrative focal point of director Noah Baumbach's new film While We're Young; an amusing, thoughtful comedy/drama that has much on its mind. But Baumbach's film isn't just about youth/maturity parallels but the process of film-making, particularly documentary film and the fuzzy distinction between detached objectivity and the unethical manipulation of subjects and events that purports to be so.

Ben Stiller plays Josh, a documentary film-maker of some renown who is married to Cornelia (Naomi Watts), the daughter of a more famous documentarian Leslie (Charles Grodin). While the filming of Josh's current project drags on, Cornelia assists her father on his own film. We learn early on that Josh and Leslie hardly have an affectionate son-in-law/father-in-law relationship. It doesn't help that Josh feels some measure of inferiority to Leslie as a film-maker; a major source of animosity and resentment.

Josh's film calls to mind the documentary Woody Allen's character in Crimes and Misdemeanors toils over; a high-minded, highly intellectual project that has little chance of engaging any movie-audience.

But Josh has other anxieties; namely his and Cornelia's childlessness in their network of parenting friends. Though Josh and Cornelia's thoughts on being parents are decidedly ambivalent; they actually cringe when they see their best friends, Marina (Maria Dizzia) and her husband (played by former Beastie Boys member Adam Horvitz) fuss with their infant. As they witness the less romantic aspects of parenting, they try to convince themselves they've made the right choice in not having children.

While feeling the pressure of middle-age imperatives, Josh meets a young, hip, twenty-something couple named Jamie (a terrific Adam Driver, who for once has a role that isn't a chalk outline) and Darby (ditto for Amanda Seyfried) who audit his continuing education film course. A conversation is struck following class, where Jamie expresses his reverence for Josh's work and mentions his own film-making aspirations. The couple invite Josh and Cornelia out for dinner, whereby Jamie extends his reverential sentiments to Cornelia for her father's extraordinary work.

Josh and Cornelia become smitten with their new friends' creative energy; even succumbing to their powerful influence. Jamie has Josh buy a hat too young for his head while Darby leads Cornelia to a hip-hop dance class. Josh and Cornelia go so far as to join the young couple in a spiritual cleansing, which entails sitting among a circle of strangers, imbibing a hallucinogenic substance, then vomiting into buckets before having visions of Ancient Egyptian gods and related nonsense.

And the closer Josh and Cornelia and Jamie and Darby become, the further the older couple find themselves drifting from their own friends and their middle-age lifestyle. Cornelia follows Marina to a mother/child music class but ultimately flees in a panic. An awkward scene where Cornelia and Josh show up at Marina's place, only to discover a party in progress to which they haven't been invited, reinforces their disaffection.

But Josh and Cornelia find that their romanticized notions about their young friend's lives may be wildly distorted. Josh often finds he must pick up checks at restaurants every time he dines with Jamie and Darby without any reciprocity. Also, Josh is initially rapturous over Jamie's documentary but gradually becomes disillusioned when he discovers his documentarian's code of ethical conduct isn't shared by his young friend. In time, he also finds that Jamie has few qualms about being dishonest in his film-making.

If one has seen a number of Baumbach's films, one is well acquainted with his acerbic sense of humor and nuanced characters. Very few inhabitants of Baumbach's world ever come off as entirely unlikeable or charming. His characters, like people in the real world, sometimes evoke our sympathy and other times weary impatience. Sometimes they seem virtuous and other times annoyingly self-interested.

In time, Josh realizes Jamie, who very often exhibits a**holish behavior, isn't the amoral jerk as he has him pegged. He is merely, in his own words; "young."

A sequence early in the film subverts our preconceived notions about the habits of the young and old when we see Josh and Cornelia's dependence on electronic media juxtaposed with shots of Jamie and Darby's embrace of throwback culture and gadgets; to wit: typewriters rather than computers and record albums rather than cds'. Also, Jamie and Darby unironically appropriate music and songs once dismissed as cheesy now rehabilitated as cool, like Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger."

Baumbach's film is all about the young/old divide and one man being caught in its interstices but it also has much to say about how Josh's approach to film-making may be antiquated. The methods of master documentarians like Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker no longer apply. Objectivity in film-making, as Josh discovers, isn't an absolute.

The performances are uniformally terrific. Ben Stiller has shown a range in both films he's made with Baumbach he seldom demonstrates in other movies. Watts is always someone to see while Seyfried finally plays someone not a bubble-head. Driver almost steals the show while it is a relief to see Charles Grodin return to the big screen. In a non-comedic role, he turns a morsel of meat into a steak.

The seamless, ever-shifting tone in the film, from loopy to tart humor to drama is Baumbach's trademark.

But in spite of my praise for the film's qualities, it is still a Noah Baumbach film and I must say I've never been a fan. His film, as his others, can be amusing but there is something always missing that keeps his work from being fully realized; as if they only exist as interesting bits and parts. While We're Young felt like something substantial when I first walked out of the theater, but shaking off the pixie dust, I found his film had little resonance.

It may be a hit in the art house movie circuit, but I myself remain unimpressed. I wouldn't dissuade anyone from seeing it and in fact, I might encourage viewing if the alternatives are Chappie or The Second Best Marigold Hotel. But if Crimes and Misdemeanors happens to be playing on T.V., well...