While We’re Young

You know how it goes. One minute you’ve got the world at your feet, the next you’re knee-deep in mort­gage bills and soiled nap­pies. The tru­ism that life pass­es us by all too quick­ly has been artic­u­lat­ed by count­less film­mak­ers over the years, with com­e­dy cin­e­ma in par­tic­u­lar serv­ing to rein­force com­mon­ly-held per­cep­tions relat­ing to the behav­iour of men and women over 40. Yet of all the recent films that rumi­nate on the inter­minable cri­sis of mid­dle-age — from Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Trans­la­tion to Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 — few have man­aged to feel as rel­e­vant as Noah Baumbach’s dis­arm­ing­ly pro­found sev­enth fea­ture, While We’re Young.

True to form, Baumbach’s film calls upon the neg­a­tive dis­course of mid­dle-age­dom for comedic effect. (After all, where would the humour lie in depict­ing an unevent­ful mid­dle-age?) Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cor­nelia (Nao­mi Watts) are a fortysome­thing Man­hat­tan cou­ple for whom pre­serv­ing a sense of free­dom is appar­ent­ly more impor­tant than start­ing a fam­i­ly. Not even their clos­est friends’ leap into par­ent­hood is enough to force Josh and Cor­nelia to reassess their pri­or­i­ties. Still, both are ful­ly con­scious of the fact that the life they’ve made togeth­er isn’t what they’d once imag­ined it would be. As Josh remarks glibly of their present sit­u­a­tion, ​“life is what hap­pens when you make oth­er plans.”

Anoth­er neg­a­tive stereo­type super­fi­cial­ly endorsed by the film is the twen­tysome­thing hip­ster — that most vague and lazi­ly ascribed of labels, which Baum­bach does well to avoid — as per­son­i­fied by Adam Dri­ver and Aman­da Seyfried’s chick­en-keep­ing, arti­sanal ice cream-mak­ing, vinyl-col­lect­ing, Williams­burg loft-dwelling roman­tics, Jamie and Dar­by. The occa­sion of these two mar­ried cou­ples form­ing an unlike­ly bond pro­vides plen­ty of sharp obser­va­tion­al humour, with Baum­bach stress­ing the dis­sim­i­lar­i­ties between them almost to the point of par­o­dy. Pre­dictably, it’s not long before Jamie and Darby’s youth­ful exu­ber­ance catal­y­ses Josh and Cornelia’s iner­tia. To be fair, Baum­bach makes it impos­si­ble not to be both fond and envi­ous of them. Jamie and Darby’s per­pet­u­al ado­les­cence is both ener­gis­ing and intimidating.

They do what they like, when the like. They stay up late and attend psy­che­del­ic ther­a­py ses­sions. They fre­quent trendy bars and throw block par­ty bar­be­ques. They make things. And yet, just as pre­dictably, Josh and Cor­nelia are no more con­tent liv­ing vic­ar­i­ous­ly through their new­found bohemi­an besties than they were before. Ini­tial­ly they want­ed to be more like them; pret­ty soon they won’t be able stand being around them.

Despite all this, you won’t find the slight­est trace of wist­ful­ness here. This is not a wal­low­ing requiem for all those com­pla­cent souls who sud­den­ly find them­selves suc­cumb­ing to the effects of grav­i­ty. Nor is it a lament for squan­dered youth. Like­wise, at no point does it feel like Baumbach’s ire is being direct­ed square­ly at con­tem­po­rary youth cul­ture. That’s not to say he’s made an impas­sioned defence of Mil­len­ni­als, but his film is not dis­mis­sive of them either.

In fact, While We’re Young doesn’t pass judge­ment on any of its char­ac­ters or the con­trast­ing demo­graph­ics they rep­re­sent — although there’s a tan­gi­ble sense of dis­dain towards what Josh describes as ​“sound­bite cul­ture”, not to men­tion the fact that portable con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy has per­me­at­ed every aspect of mod­ern liv­ing. If any­thing, the only thing Baum­bach dis­plays nos­tal­gia towards is, well, things. Specif­i­cal­ly, the kind of out­mod­ed, hand-craft­ed para­pher­na­lia and pop cul­ture relics from the writer/director’s for­ma­tive years that have been reclaimed by today’s youth to feed their own much maligned retromania.

Baum­bach is no mis­an­thrope, he’s sim­ply not afraid to show human­i­ty in all its flawed glo­ry. He’s the type of film­mak­er who’s at his best when occu­py­ing the head­spaces of self-destruc­tive yet sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ters, from Ben Stiller’s failed musi­cian in 2010’s Green­berg, to Gre­ta Gerwig’s fleet-foot­ed goof in the director’s pre­vi­ous (and best) film, 2012’s Frances Ha. The dif­fer­ence with While We’re Young is that, while we can cer­tain­ly relate to each pro­tag­o­nist, we’re nev­er encour­aged to invest in their domes­tic lives on a more mean­ing­ful lev­el. This is in essence not a char­ac­ter study, then, but rather a study of the way we are, a sort of con­nect-the-dots exer­cise devised to reveal some basic truths relat­ing to the human condition.

Baum­bach doesn’t deal in broad brush­strokes. He knows that not all twen­tysome­things are enti­tled free­load­ers, just as not all fortysome­things are baby-crazy sad sacks. So what’s he try­ing to say by depict­ing them as such? Per­haps it’s his way of sub­vert­ing two of the more ubiq­ui­tous stereo­types per­pet­u­at­ed by main­stream stu­dio come­dies. Because if there’s one over­ar­ch­ing tenet to be derived from While We’re Young, it’s that peo­ple should be defined by their actions, not their age or social sta­tus. After all, doesn’t every­one feel the weight of social expec­ta­tion to some extent? Aren’t we all seek­ing self-ful­fil­ment, regard­less of when, why or how often our per­spec­tive flips? We are all dri­ven by fear. Fear of fail­ure. Fear of not fit­ting in. The only way we can ever hope to over­come this is by attempt­ing to fig­ure out what it is that makes us happy.

Ever since his 1995 debut, Kick­ing and Scream­ing, Baum­bach has con­sis­tent­ly sub­scribed to the view­point that there are no assur­ances in life, no sin­gle mantra to guar­an­tee well­be­ing. The upshot of this is that you have to learn to be tol­er­ant of oth­er people’s atti­tudes and opin­ions, even if they hap­pen to clash with your own. Take Jamie, for instance. Sure he’s insin­cere, nar­cis­sis­tic and self­ish, but does that make him a bad guy? Not as far as Baum­bach is con­cerned. (If ear­ly rumours prove accu­rate, audi­ences will have to wait until lat­er this year to see Dri­ver play a prop­er villain.)

He and Josh are alike in so many ways — both are cul­tur­al­ly engaged doc­u­men­tar­i­ans aspir­ing to great­ness, both are sin­gle-mind­ed (often to a fault) in their approach to get­ting ahead in life. In oth­er ways, they’re com­plete oppo­sites, espe­cial­ly when it comes to putting their respec­tive prin­ci­ples into prac­tice. This equates to a clash of per­son­al­i­ties that nim­bly treads the line between com­e­dy and tragedy. It’s first-hand expe­ri­ence ver­sus cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion, indi­vid­u­al­ism ver­sus eth­i­cal integri­ty, ana­logue ver­sus dig­i­tal. At one point, Josh refers to Jamie as ​“patho­log­i­cal­ly hap­py.” It’s not an accu­rate descrip­tion, of course; he’s no more immune to the inse­cu­ri­ties of adult­hood than Josh. He just hides it better.

If there’s a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal lilt to While We’re Young, it’s most evi­dent in the dys­func­tion­al rela­tion­ship between Josh and his father-in-law and men­tor, Leslie, played by the great Charles Grodin. Baum­bach is the son of the schol­ar, nov­el­ist and crit­ic Jonathan Baum­bach and the Vil­lage Voice crit­ic Geor­gia Brown. If there is any­thing to be dis­cerned from Josh’s (and Jamie’s) con­stant approval seek­ing, which builds grad­u­al­ly before crescen­do­ing some­what abrupt­ly in a melo­dra­mat­ic con­fronta­tion at a black-tie trib­ute, it’s that no mat­ter how old we get, we nev­er stop want­i­ng to make our par­ents proud. This is Baumbach’s wis­est and most uni­ver­sal film, gen­tly shak­en by an exis­ten­tial anx­i­ety that under­pins it as a piece of deeply per­son­al filmmaking.