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.

Screen Actors Guild nominations kick off industry awards

Emma Stone and Edward Norton were each nominated by the Screen Actors Guild for their performances in Birdman, which was also nominated for best ensemble.

The nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards were announced Wednesday morning – bright and early if you are on the West Coast, reasonably mid-morning out East, and if you are an East Coaster out West for the week, well, it is just a weird way to start the day. Regardless, let us dive right in.

The importance of the Screen Actors Guild Awards to the Oscar race is that these are the first major industry awards to announce nominees. Critics and awards-giving bodies are good for consensus, but industry voters – the folks nominating for SAG – are many of the same people voting on the Academy Awards nominees and winners. So this gives us a more concrete idea where we are heading. In that respect, a few things were confirmed this morning, and a few things stood out as surprises.

The Screen Actors Guild Awards nominees:

BEST ENSEMBLE

Birdman

Boyhood

The Imitation Game

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Theory of Everything

BEST ACTOR

Michael Keaton, Birdman

Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything

Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game

Steve Carell, Foxcatcher

Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler

BEST ACTRESS

Julianne Moore, Still Alice

Reese Witherspoon, Wild

Jennifer Aniston, Cake

Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Robert Duvall, The Judge

Ethan Hawke, Boyhood

Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher

Edward Norton, Birdman

JK Simmons, Whiplash

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Patricia Arquette, Boyhood

Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game

Emma Stone, Birdman

Meryl Streep, Into the Woods

Naomi Watts, St. Vincent

First, the surprises and my favorite nomination of the morning, Jake Gyllenhaal is nominated for best actor for his performance in Nightcrawler. It is a seedy, dirty, impressive little film from first-time feature director Dan Gilroy, and Gyllenhaal is amazing in it. As a freelance “journalist” exploiting the worst traits of the modern news media, Gyllenhaal is scary good. The movie has done well by independent standards and is back in theaters for a limited run. If you get a chance, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Jennifer Aniston is a surprise best actress nominee at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for her performance in Cake.

Over in the best actress category, the big surprise is Jennifer Aniston’s nomination for Cake, which I have not seen. Considered by many to be a week year for actresses – though it really is not if you know where to look – the category is ripe for an upset nomination or two. Aniston gets in at the expense of Marion Cotillard, who had been picking up steam for her performances in The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night.

Robert Duvall is the big surprise in supporting actor and not necessarily a pleasant one. The Judge was a widely panned, largely forgotten box office failure. Duvall’s nomination seems more like proof that well-respected older actors with a lot of friends and fans in the industry can be nominated for less-than-stellar work in subpar films. I would have rather seen maybe Alec Baldwin for Still Alice or an outside shot such as Michael Fassbender for Frank or Chris O’Dowd for Calvary.

In supporting actress, Naomi Watts gets in for St. Vincent, a film that had mostly been positioned as a nomination vehicle for Bill Murray. With a crowded best actor field, that was always unlikely to happen, but Watts’ nomination at least shows some support for the little film that has found some success in theaters.

Even without an individual acting nomination, The Grand Budapest Hotel sneaks into the top category for best ensemble – which includes Murray, so he was not entirely shut out today. This nomination keeps the film firmly in the conversation for the Academy Awards, not an easy feat for a quirky independent film released early in the year. Such is the respect Wes Anderson garners.

Overall, the rich got richer as Birdman earned four nominations on the morning, while Boyhood, The Imitation Game, and The Theory of Everything each pulled down three nominations, including for best ensemble. All four are expected to be major Best Picture players at the Oscars. The only possibly irksome thing here is the nod for Theory of Everything, which is really a two-hander between Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones more than a true ensemble piece. Something such as Foxcatcher is probably more deserving of ensemble recognition.

Tomorrow, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will announce its nominees for the Golden Globes, and we will have a whole new list of nominees from which to tease out information. Things will start to move pretty fast from here.

New movie review: Birdman

Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, who cannot bear to look at the man in the mirror in Birdman.

What we talk about when we talk about fame depends largely on when we are talking about it. A thousand years ago, the question may have been: Are you a member of a royal family or perhaps an explorer? A hundred years ago, are you in politics or some kind of war hero? Twenty years ago, are you on TV or the covers of magazines? Today, have you gone viral or how many followers do you have?

If it has not already, the phrase “Twitter followers” will soon be redundant. There are more people being followed on Twitter and more followers than many major religions can boast. The world of social media is a religion unto itself, full of arbitrary rules, rituals, hysteria, exploitation, abuse, worship, true believers, and those just dipping their toes in the water. The one thing it cannot offer – what most religions purport to offer – is any lasting meaning.

So what of art and artists and their search for a deeper truth? Is it even out there to find, or is it simply too ephemeral to grasp? In a hashtag democracy, in which influence and importance are measured in charts of trending topics, what does it take to create something of value? If it cannot be validated or dismissed in 140 characters, does it even have value? These are the preoccupations of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s dazzling new film Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

The director of Biutiful and the communication-breakdown trilogy of Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, Iñárritu has always made films about humans’ deep desire to connect with one another and their tragic inability to do so. Now, he drops his latest movie into a world in which it is easier than ever to make connections with people around the globe, but Iñárritu and co-writers Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo tackle head on the inherent superficiality of those connections.

Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, an actor famous for a superhero franchise he made two decades ago but who now wants only to leave a legacy of honesty and artistic integrity. In that pursuit, he mounts an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” on Broadway. It is a telling choice for a man who equates respect and admiration with love, though what he desires is all three.

For this role, Keaton is playing so many layers with such deftness and acuity that the onus is on the audience to keep up as he steps in and out of depression, madness, and mania. Thompson is a man who struggles everyday with who he is, who he was, who he wants to be, and whether he has any choice in the matter. Only an actor as comfortable in his own skin as Keaton could portray a character so uncomfortable in his.

Put another way, Keaton disappears into the role of an actor playing a character he wrote to be autobiographical while remaining true to his source material, and at the same time, he is haunted by the power of a role he cannot escape. If that description is difficult to decipher, it is not half as difficult as it would be to perform, but Keaton makes it look easy. He hits every nuance in every beat without ever giving the audience the sense the wheels are turning. It is instinctual. It is feral. It is brilliant.

To find one performer in a film acting on that level is a small miracle. To find a whole cast matching that energy and intensity, well, that is Birdman. While Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan, and Andrea Riseborough are doing invaluable work on the margins of the story, Edward Norton and Emma Stone shine in key supporting roles, respectively, as an actor whose only obligation is to the truth and a daughter whose truth may be too much to bear.

There is no real villain of the piece, just a lot of people trying their best to be honest to themselves or lying to themselves about how much honesty they want regardless of who gets hurt in the process. Norton’s consummate stage professional Mike Shiner is the epitome of this. Brought in as a replacement in Thompson’s production, Shiner is a magnificent actor who makes the play better but whose every action undermines the heart of what Thompson is trying to create.

Norton is excellent every time he creates havoc for everyone else by searching for his own truth, but his best moments are the quiet rooftop conversations he shares with Stone. Stone is Sam, Thompson’s drug addict daughter who is fresh out of rehab. Sam and Mike try to connect, they try to be honest with each other, but they cannot.

They resort to truth or dare – a wonderful metaphor for people’s inability to tell the truth without playing games – and much to Sam’s chagrin, Mike chooses truth every time. Truth is all that matters to him, even though, as he says, he only ever finds it on the stage. Sam wants dare. She wants excitement. She wants something more than words.

This is why, when her father comes to her to apologize for not being there for her, she can take no more. She erupts like a volcano spewing vitriol. She strikes him where she knows it will hurt the most: his irrelevance. He does not matter and never will matter. He does not have Twitter or Facebook, she says. He is not a trending topic. His play could run forever, and no one will care because it will never get a million views on YouTube or feature on some popular reality series.  

She intends to cut him to the bone and does, but in the same breath, she delivers an ironic indictment of her own generation. By tearing her father down for failing to keep up with the culture, she is exposing just how perverted and backward that culture has become. It is less a turning point than a statement of purpose, clueing the audience into the meaning of what has come before and what is yet to come.

In these moments, Stone is perfect, and when she reaches the point where she knows she has gone too far, she stops, but the camera holds on her face. Tears well in her eyes, but she cannot cry. She meant what she said but hates that she said it. She hates that she meant it. The beginning of an apology escapes her lips: “Dad …,” she says. But she cannot go on, and he does not turn to her. She has shamed herself more than him and slinks out of the room, leaving her father to slip deeper into the madness that has enveloped him.

He is falling, and nothing can stop him. That propulsive downward spiral is matched by Iñárritu and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s shooting style. Except for the prologue and a single climactic montage, the whole film is structured and shot to look like one unbroken take. The few edits employed are seamlessly integrated into the camera movements, and though the story takes place over days, each new scene plays out uninterrupted in real time.

What this means for viewers is that they dive headlong into the action, and for two hours, they never get a chance to breathe. The anxiety builds for the audience and the characters in equal measure, and because the camera never looks away from the pain, the guilt, and the shame, the audience does not get to avert its eyes either.

This is what it is to create, to pour your heart into something, to spill blood for something. Most of us never look up from our phones or our laptops or our televisions long enough to experience anything so unremittingly real. But Iñárritu has been through it, and he knows the feeling of constructing truth out of nothingness. Keaton and the rest of the cast know that feeling, too. And now, because we have the chance to live the process with Riggan Thompson, maybe we in the audience can get a little closer to knowing that feeling.

See it? Yes.