The hipster vibe in writer/director Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young eventually became too much for me to bear. Looking back on it now, it begins immediately with quotes from Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” expressing an aging generation’s fear of the younger generation. This is a general theme on which the film focuses as it explores a couple in their mid-40s and the discontent that has set in as their friends are all having children, becoming the societal definition of what it means to be an adult. For the first 30 minutes or so I’m rolling with this, but once While We’re Young gets knee deep into its story I found myself drowning in a subculture with which I can’t connect or even understand.
The film’s test subjects are Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts), a mid-40s couple on the edge of a mid-life crisis, who are pushed over the edge when they meet Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried).
Josh is a documentarian whose first doc was looked at as a success, but he’s been working on his second for ten years now with no end in sight. To hear him attempt to explain what it’s about is the equivalent of a sleeping pill. Josh’s filmmaking malaise is equaled in his personal life, but a spark of energy walks into his life when he meets Jamie, a Gen-Y hipster if there ever was one.
Jamie flatters Josh at every turn, everything to Jamie is “beautiful”. He and Darby live in a massive New York City loft, collecting records and watching movies on VHS while she makes organic ice cream. Never before has one couple so perfectly embodied the whole of the hipster cliche, and while that’s clearly the point of these characters, I can’t help but hear nails on a chalkboard with every cutesy thing they say.
The film explores a cross-section of cultures as the old and young come together, both searching for an identity. Josh and Cornelia are shown to be dedicated to their gadgets and modern conveniences while Jamie and Darby are more interested in vinyl, VHS, street beaches and Ayahuasca. Neither of these two cultures can I find myself clinging to and with how whole-heartedly Josh and Cornelia take to Jamie and Darby’s way of living I had a hard time connecting to the narrative as much as I just got progressively annoyed.
While We’re Young owes a lot to Woody Allen, but I felt if this had been a Woody Allen film, Allen would have played Josh’s character and instead of being deceived by Jamie he would have seen through him from the start. This I could have connected with as Jamie and Darby are originally presented as a couple of spontaneous free thinkers, though they are anything but. Everything they do is calculated with a greater goal in mind and the fact it takes Josh so long to see this is something I just couldn’t get over. Call it my own personal hang ups, but I can’t help it.
That said, this film is going to likely connect with a lot of people much more than it did with me or at least people will be able to remove themselves from the equation and relish in the social satire and humor much more than I did. While many will probably give Stiller the bulk of attention for his whiny performance, I found Watts to be the film’s stand-out actor, playing Cornelia as a far more revealing and honest character than anyone else in the film. Charles Grodin is also a good bit of casting, playing Cornelia’s successful father and a character I would have preferred to see more from, offering additional insight into what is happening between Josh and Jamie.
In the beginning, Josh and Cornelia are having a conversation regarding their lives and the fact they don’t have children, stressing the importance of the freedom they have over their friends saddled with children. However, they recognize they haven’t really done anything with this freedom. Josh then says, “We have the freedom, what we do with it isn’t that important.” To me this is a key statement and I felt the final scene in the film could have shown them in Paris or some exotic locale, finally taking advantage of their freedom, but Baumbach chooses to go another way. This is just one more example of how Baumbach’s film zigs when I would have preferred it zagged. Oh well…
