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How entertaining? ★★★★★
Thought provoking? ★★★☆☆ 9 December 2014
This article is a review of WHILE WE'RE YOUNG.Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2014. (For more information, click here.)
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“A month is still in the realm of spontaneity,” Josh (Ben Stiller) to Cordelia (Naomi Watts)
Writer-director Noah Baumbach continues to catalogue our capacity to be insufferable. From THE SQUID AND THE WHALE to FRANCES HA, the self-deluded artist/creative in us has been humanised, and given short shrift, to winning effect. Being out of step with your peers also predominates his work – a perennial cause of insecurity through comparison. Like Ricky Gervais, our blind spots are an endless resource to mine in excruciating detail. As with fellow writer-director Hong Sang-soo (HILL OF FREEDOM), looking at obnoxious filmmakers, questions are raised as to how autobiographical the work is. Accompanying rat race preoccupation is a contemplation of aging in a youth-prized modern world.
Writer-director Noah Baumbach continues to catalogue our capacity to be insufferable. From THE SQUID AND THE WHALE to FRANCES HA, the self-deluded artist/creative in us has been humanised, and given short shrift, to winning effect. Being out of step with your peers also predominates his work – a perennial cause of insecurity through comparison. Like Ricky Gervais, our blind spots are an endless resource to mine in excruciating detail. As with fellow writer-director Hong Sang-soo (HILL OF FREEDOM), looking at obnoxious filmmakers, questions are raised as to how autobiographical the work is. Accompanying rat race preoccupation is a contemplation of aging in a youth-prized modern world.
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Are lead couple, Josh and Cordelia, foundering with parenthood as they struggle to tell a children’s story? Turns out, the new parents are buds Fletcher (Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz) and Marina (Maria Dizzia), who chuck out cliché joys of bringing a life into the world. In an eventual blaze of honesty, hitting the characters, the equivalent of an action movie melee denouement, well into the runtime, Fletcher movingly lays out the truths of having a baby. Meanwhile, we have an entire film’s worth of self-deception. Prepare to watch through your fingers in empathetic embarrassment.
Josh, 44, and Cordelia, 43, are caught in the scratch record debate of whether to become parents. Clearly something is missing, or is it their perception? A substance-less routine nags. Maybe the point is that we have freedom, it doesn’t matter what we do with it – Josh defensively argues for their lifestyle. Failure at realising contentment is a first world problem. WHILE WE’RE YOUNG does not try to offer a panacea, but come the conclusion, an ambiguous cinematic balm is offered – cynical coda or inevitable human destination?
Caught between friends having kids and the presence of youthful drive rears its head in the form of 25-year olds, married couple Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Josh is a documentarian and lecturer. Jamie is in his class and invites him to hang-out with them. So commences an inter-generational friendship between the two spousal pairs.
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Analogue versus digital. As the forty-somethings contentedly grapple in the modern world, the youth regress to board games and VHS cassettes. Grasping at the cool, Cordelia and Josh lurch; witness the former attending a hip-hop dance class or the latter sporting a trilby. Hipster 20-year olds don’t escape the piercing satire of Baumbach either: Controlled, manipulative and money-grubbing - Jamie and Darby never offer to pay a bill. (Miserly behaviour can also be found in the Jeff Daniels’ character in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE.)
So far so discerning Baumbach. Raising his craft to another level is the analysis of filmmaking. Once showing promise, little seen first feature has lead to sophomore anxiety; Josh has been working on the follow-up for almost a decade. Living in the shadow of father-in-law documentary legend, Leslie (Charles Grodin), and marrying his producer daughter, has deepened professional anxiety. Wait till you get a load of the conversations on the nature of authenticity, truth and objectivity. Is WHILE WE’RE YOUNG Baumback’s apex?
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