While We’re
Young
(2014)
(SPOILERS) I
run a bit lukewarm on Noah Baumbach’s films. They tend to occupy a curiously
diffident space, somewhere between sub-Woody Allen New York quirk and the kind
of rather pedestrian, broader subject matter that fits easily into a much less
indie, much more overtly Hollywood approach – just with slight tweaks to tone and casting. While We’re Young is very much of this
ilk, hanging a plot concerning artistic expression that might have been lifted
from Crimes and Misdemeanours from
the peg of a middle-aged couple wary of their inexorable transition from youth.
As such,
there’s nothing very special here, aside from the performances. Even then, Ben
Stiller’s Josh is recognisably Ben Stiller, the beta-male goofball we know so
well from his major Hollywood roles, just a bit less off-the-wall and with
fewer (a few fewer) pratfalls. His ensnarement into being flattered, and
feeling validated/rejuvenated, by a young pretender (Jamie, Adam Driver) to his
throne of eminent documentary maker is entirely predictable. Equally so that his
ego must be brought crashing down when he discovers this usurper has used him
to further his own career (using to him to hook up with Josh’s father-in-law,
the inestimable Charles Grodin). There is consequent fallout on Josh’s
relationship with wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts), and their ties with friends and
recent parents Adam Horovitz and Maria Dizzia. Rather insultingly, Baumbach
seems to be saying that such midlife restlessness can simply be cured by having
a child, filling a gap of rather facile ennui.
Jamie, with
his less culpable wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried, very good) in tow, is a horrible
hipster, a fellow who listens only to LPs and watches movies only on videotape.
Good as Driver is, his character is a crude, Machiavellian, sociopathic
caricature of a hipster, “It’s like he
saw a sincere person and he’s been imitating him ever since” complains
Josh. But then he concludes “He’s not
evil. He’s just young”, as if Baumbach has resolved, shaking his head, that
later generations just cannot be understood and so must be consigned to a moral
vacuum.
En route to
this point, we encounter numerous faintly tiresome clichés of the mid-life
crisis drama. Vignettes include couple-swapping (well, almost), drug-taking (ayahuasca),
dancing to hip-hop and rote cod-psychology (Josh has been using his movie – a
decade in the making – as an excuse not
to do anything with his life, including having children). The amusing part is,
the boring movie Josh is making actually sounds much more interesting than the
one Baumbach has made, with it’s
discussion of military interests creating the Internet as a part of an overall
strategy (“Josh, you know, the whole
world isn’t a conspiracy against you” levels Cornelia at one point). Albeit,
this is all couched within a self-consciously mocking-yet-reverent milieu of
pseudo-intellectual New Yorkers.
Worth
seeing for Grodin (“You’ve made a six-and-a-half-hour
film that feels like its seven hours too long”) and the players generally,
but Baumbach’s too young (yes, he is) to descend into this kind of
self-indulgent navel-gazing, particularly when he isn’t half as witty or
insightful as the peak-period Woody he’s desperately aping.
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