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.

Dan Harmon and the unstoppable forces of community

Dan Harmon (right) and Harmontown director Neil Berkeley participated in a moderated Q and A Saturday at the IFC Center in New York City.

Dan Harmon is called a lot of things throughout Neil Berkeley’s new documentary, Harmontown – a genius, an ass hole, an alcoholic, a brilliant writer, a control freak, etc. A lot of words are spent by people who know him and by the man himself to describe his effect on his fans and to describe the feeling of loving this man and his work. Ultimately, though, there is one word that covers it all: community.

Yes, that is the name of the NBC show Harmon created and was fired from before being rehired only to see it canceled. It will live again on Yahoo’s streaming service this winter. But it is more than a television show. It is a feeling and philosophy. Harmon’s show, his podcast, and his overall body of work function a bit like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster – something massive but misunderstood, capable of ugliness and beauty, but ultimately out of the creator’s hands.

Dan Harmon explains his process.

Harmon is undoubtedly a creative force whose mind is going a thousand miles per hour at any given moment. He is the man behind two cult television shows, one of which has just one episode, and a popular podcast that draws listeners from every corner of the country. But by breathing life into these phenomena, he has spawned a living entity he could never have foreseen. The community of people who listen to him speak and watch his shows and read what he writes exists because of Harmon but apart from him.

Harmon and Berkeley brought Harmontown the film to New York City’s IFC Center on Friday night and stuck around for a Q and A, but the sold-out show’s popularity was such that the IFC Center was compelled to add a second day, for which Harmon and Berkeley were gracious enough to return. The skies threatened more rain on an already damp Saturday afternoon, but the Harmon acolytes, myself among them, lined up an hour before the screening to guarantee the best seats possible for this show. It was worth it.

Berkeley’s film is by turns an intimate exploration of life on the road, a warts-and-all portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, and a loving tribute to the community of devotees who are as unique as the subject of the film. The movie spends a lot of time with Harmon and his close-knit circle of collaborators, including girlfriend Erin McGathy, co-host Jeff B. Davis, and dungeon master Spencer Crittenden. While they all provide insight into Harmon, each is a story unto himself or herself.

Crittenden, in particular, draws in viewers, and even Harmon calls him the hero of the film. Crittenden was a fan – a Harmenian, as the figurative residents of Harmontown call themselves – whose goal was just to play Dungeons and Dragons with Harmon and Davis. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and has played D&D with Harmon, Davis, and a host of famous faces (a baffled Jason Sudeikis is a highlight of the film) across the country. Rather than in leaps and bounds, Crittenden’s growth comes in baby steps, as it does for so many of us, but to witness it is to understand and empathize.

There are interviews with celebrities such as Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, most of the cast of Community, and others, and a lot of their material is gold, but the best moments are with the fans. These people are the reason Harmon does this, and his appreciation for their support is something that sets him apart from other heroes and idols, who rarely have the time of day. Most of his fans just want to meet the man, take a picture, tell him how much he means to them, and be on the receiving end of a great big bear hug, as Harmon is wont to give.

Dan Harmon, a big hug, and me.

After the Saturday Q and A, Harmon, who must have gone through the same process the night before, made himself available to everyone who chose to stay. When told the theater needed to be cleared out for the next showing, he moved into the lobby. When told the lobby must be cleared, he stood outside on the sidewalk. When asked to come inside to sign publicity posters, he said he would prefer to meet his fans first before doing anything else.

Not wanting to hold up anyone else, I spoke only briefly to Harmon. I told him he saved my life. I told him that in the darkest moments I have had, I reached for Community. Here was a show about people who need each other, and when I just needed someone – all respect to the family and friends who were also there for me – Community was where I looked.

He told me he was glad his show was there for me to reach for and thanked me for my support. I said, “No, thank you,” and that was it. I got my picture and my hug and moved along, but the experience will stay with me, and I am sure that is true for all those who were there, for all those whose lives Harmon has touched. And what that means more than anything is that if the dark days ever return to my life or any of theirs, we can always turn to our community.