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| 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.
