New movie review: While We’re Young

Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller play a middle-aged married couple in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young.

In each stage of adult life, it seems we must pose ourselves a question. Early on, it is: What am I supposed to do? Then, it becomes: What am I going to do? That is followed by: What am I am doing? Finally, for all of us, it ends with: What have I done? The progression is as natural as the life cycle of a salmon, and every one of us is swimming upstream in search of the answers.

The opening moments of While We’re Young depict a middle-aged married couple completely baffled by taking care of a newborn baby. The woman begins to tell a fairytale, which seems to soothe the child, but as she forgets the basic details of the story, the happy, familial narrative falls apart, as does she when the child starts to cry. The husband is at a loss and has no help to offer. Then, the child’s actual parents come running in, and the stage is set for the couple’s joint midlife crisis.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach has always specialized in upper-middle-class angst in such films as The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg. His last film, Frances Ha, was a marked departure, full of youthful energy and refreshing joie de vivre. In While We’re Young, Baumbach tries to blend the two approaches, but it becomes pretty apparent where his sympathies lie.

The ever-versatile Naomi Watts joins a toned down Ben Stiller as Cornelia and Josh, a childless couple whose friends all seem to have moved on to the child-rearing phase of life and left them behind. It is as relatable a concept as Baumbach has yet tried, and Watts and Stiller find a neat balance of hurt and self-delusion in their characterizations.

After realizing they are not on the same wavelength as their friends who are new parents, they return home and discuss how happy they are with their lives and how, without children, they are free to pick up and leave on a European vacation any time they please. Well, they would obviously need time to plan, they reason, and of course, they have not traveled anywhere in eight years, but the point is that any time they want to go, they can. Nothing is tying them down.

In truth, they are deep in denial. Maybe they do want a child. They have tried before, and Cornelia miscarried. She is unwilling to go through that experience again. At the same time, Josh is a documentary filmmaker who showed promise when he was young but has spent the last 10 years working on the follow-up to his first movie. Just as they begin to face some hard questions about their lives – namely: What am I doing? (see above) – something comes along to distract them.

The distraction is another couple, Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver (Girls, Tracks) and Amanda Seyfried (Chloe). They are young, wild, and full of life in all the ways Cornelia and Josh are not. For Cornelia, they represent an attractive alternative to her middle-aged friends’ baby talk and, in a standout sequence, their mommy-and-me-type music classes. For Josh, it is something much more specific. In Jamie, a budding documentarian himself, Josh sees all the potential he never fulfilled.

So, Josh and Cornelia revert to the extended adolescence embodied by the younger couple, and they spend their time doing drugs, going to parties, and eating homemade ice cream. Josh marvels at how these kids are constantly creating things, an impressive feat to a man who has spent a decade working on a single film. What no one ever stops to ask is whether the things they create – art, film, ice cream, etc. – have value.

This question, perhaps more than any other, will be key to understanding the current generation of 20-somethings, who are all asking themselves what they are supposed to do and what they are going to do, and Baumbach puts it right at the heart of his movie. Due to the unprecedented economic successes of their parents and grandparents, those people just becoming adults now have more opportunities and options for how to spend their lives than any previous generation in history. They will be defined by how they waste or embrace those chances.

At about the midway point of the film, Baumbach and editor Jennifer Lame piece together a brilliant montage of the two couples going about their separate lives. Jamie and Darby listen to classical music on vinyl records and watch VHS copies of crummy ‘50s sci-fi movies, while Josh watches The Daily Show on his phone, and Cornelia listens to pop music on Spotify and plays games on her iPad. The joke is that young people like old things. We might call them hipsters, but the implications are far more insidious than that.

I think we are at a point in our shared cultural dialogue where we can admit a few things. Vinyl records are cumbersome and limiting. VHS tapes have terrible picture quality. New music is fine, and cell phones have broadened the possibilities of communication beyond anything we ever thought possible. By not embracing new technology, Jamie and Darby – and the segment of their generation they represent – are effectively rejecting the opportunities progress affords them.

Early in their friendship, the four of them are having a discussion when one of them brings up a snack they all love but to which they cannot recall one of the key ingredients. They try to remember for a moment, then Josh goes to his phone to check online. He is stopped by Jamie, who says, “Let’s just not know.” He then sits back and smiles. It is a clear renunciation of the Information Age. Just about anything one could want to learn is at his fingertips, but Jamie would rather not know.

The film is not an indictment of either couple as Baumbach has never made a movie that simplistic. Instead, it is a contrast of the ways people from different generations approach their lives. There is a happy medium between analyzing our lives to the point of tedium and shutting out reality to the point of ignorance. As Josh and Cornelia work toward that medium and Jamie and Darby resist it, the point becomes clear. Asking questions is great while we are young, but as we get older, it becomes equally important to find the answers.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Tracks

Mia Wasikowska leads a journey through the desert in Tracks.

In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out on a 1,700-mile trek from Alice Springs, Australia, to the ocean. She intended to walk the length of the journey, accompanied by her dog and the four wild camels she trained to carry her load. John Curran’s new film, Tracks, based on Davidson’s book of the same name, is a generally faithful retelling of this trip. Those familiar with the story will find little suspense in wondering about the outcome, but a mystery remains: Why has she chosen to do this?

That the film makes explicit in voiceover her reasoning is no help in answering the central question. The decision to ditch the world at large would be vexing to most, but it is absolutely baffling to the family and friends left behind. In these matters, there are generally two kinds of people – those who find comfort, stability, and joy among their loved ones and those who bristle at such tethers – and the latter will never make sense to the former.

From the start, it is clear Davidson has family and friends who love her. She loves them, as well, in the ways she is able, but they cannot offer her what she seeks: the solemnity and introspection in being alone. Before she leaves, several friends visit to see her off and, if they can, try to talk her out of this. They sit around the fire in her makeshift shelter and drink and smoke and chatter about the world, while she sits off to the side and observes.

These interactions mean little to Davidson, and their conversations register only as white noise. She escapes the trappings of the hut and steps out under the stars to be with her camels. Only in the wild is she truly at home, and only with her beasts is she at peace. The concerns and protestations of her family and friends do not move her because those are the very precepts from which she is escaping.

As she says later in the film, when she is in the wilderness in the company of her camels and her dog, she is free – free from the expectations, disappointments, and obligations that often define our relationships with the people in our lives. Whether she achieves this freedom, this enlightenment in solitude, will largely depend on the kind of person the viewer is.

If you believe there are reasons we live in communities and that the connections we make with others make life worth living, then there is not much in this film to dissuade you from that belief. However, if you are the kind of person who sees the boundlessness of nature and desires to explore that which lies beyond the strictures of our society, you will likely find enough here to confirm that view, as well.

Mia Wasikowska, whom you will no doubt recognize from Tim Burton’s recent Alice in Wonderland, is fantastic as Davidson. The role calls for the actress to be at once hardened by the events of her past and open to the possibilities of the future. Wasikowska embodies this duality with grace and skill, masterfully portraying the kind of woman who has enough charisma to peak the curiosity and admiration of readers the world over but who shies away from the attention she draws.

The emotional deftness of the performance is matched by its bruising physicality. Davidson hiked 1,700 miles across some of the harshest terrain Mother Nature has seen fit to produce, and Curran and Wasikowska combine to make sure the audience feels every inch of that walk. She is blistered and bloodied but remains tenacious and resilient.

To fund her journey, Davidson accepted sponsorship from National Geographic magazine, and as a condition of this support, she was required to allow a photographer to record portions of her journey. Adam Driver (HBO’s Girls) plays Rick Smolan, who ventures into the unknown on several occasions to meet Davidson along the way. Driver is good as the affable outsider on Davidson’s spiritual quest.

He is intrigued by her but respectful of her process enough to keep his distance. As a journalist who travels to all corners of the globe to document whatever he finds, there may be no one better equipped to understand the appeal in choosing the life of a nomad. But kindred spirits or not, the film never loses sight of the fact that this is the story of Davidson’s solo journey across the Outback.

And what a gorgeous journey it is. Inspired by the real-life photos Smolan took for National Geographic, the cinematography throughout the film is awe-inspiring. Mandy Walker, who also lensed Baz Luhrman’s Australia, brings that same eye for the local scenery but is gifted a richer color palette by Curran and makes full use of it. The oranges and whites pop brilliantly against an endless expanse of blue sky, and the heat of the desert practically radiates off the screen.

Several months into her journey, Davidson arrives at a white-sand desert. Curran and Walker choose to shoot her entry into this territory from a distant overhead vantage point, like a vulture eyeing a potential next meal. The pristine white sand, which suggests nothing living has ever ventured to these lands, gives the eerie feeling that Davidson and her beasts have walked off the edge of the film and into the blankness beyond.

And then we see the tracks they make with every slow and shaky step. Whatever she comes away with from this journey, in this moment, the footsteps she leaves behind seem to say, “I am Robyn Davidson, and in this place, I was free.”

See it? Yes.