Our NYFF coverage continues with Matthew Eng on this year's surprise screening -- which was less of a secret than usual this year, continually hinted at by the NYFF themselves, even spoiled ahead of time by IndieWire...
Ben Stiller & Naomi Watts star in "While We're Young"
Noah Baumbach is showing his age.
Not that this is the first time, mind you. Anyone who stuck through his exquisitely harsh and thus totally divisive Greenberg will surely remember Ben Stiller’s crusty, titular protagonist sourly announcing to a party full of fuzzed-out twentysomethings, “I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.”
There’s something instantly more pronounced about Baumbach’s evident unease towards the current generational divide in his latest adult dramedy, While We’re Young, in which Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as Josh and Cornelia, a deceptively comfortable urban couple who are surprised to find themselves befriended and seduced by Jamie and Darby, a married pair of kind-eyed, porkpie-wearing, Bushwick-dwelling hipsters, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. What starts as a casual, multi-generational friendship soon transitions into something more consuming, as Josh, a struggling documentary filmmaker whose sophomore follow-up has taken ten years to finish, finds himself both aping and inspiring Jamie, who just so happens to be an aspiring documentarian himself. [more...]
Adam Driver, Noah Baumbach, and Ben Stiller on the set of "While We're Young"
Along the way, everything from the sanctity of marriage to the morals of documentary moviemaking to the cozy consolations of middle-age, middle-class, Brooklyn-brownstone yuppiehood gets put to the test.
On the heels of the loose, freewheeling funniness of last year’s Frances Ha, there’s something immediately surprising and increasingly disconcerting about just how broad Baumbach has allowed his humor to stretch here. While We’re Young is chock full of stunts and scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of place on the most conventional of network sitcoms: giddy attempts at athletic activity that lead to the embarrassing spraining of bad backs that then lead to the even more embarrassing, age-affirming doctor visits; the silly donning of ghastly fedoras and toe-pinching Oxfords; an ayahuasca ceremony that produces a string of vomit gags; the spontaneous and inherently humiliating hip-hop classes that yield the wholly unprecedented sight of Naomi Watts doing her best Fly Girl interpretation, and only marginally embarrassing her character in the process.
It is shockingly easy to imagine the Nancy Meyers version of this set-up, maybe even this same script, say with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton as the slightly-older, rut-stuck Bougies, and Justin Timberlake and Anne Hathaway as the liberating free-spirits, or even the Judd Apatow version, with Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, James Franco, and Mila Kunis in all the obvious roles.
Initially, the overreaching of Baumbach’s comedy is kept in check by—most crucially—Jennifer Lame’s lean, precisely-cut montages, as well as the fine-tuned oscillations of the ever-prolific Driver, who, at this rate, will probably EGOT by the time he hits 40. Driver thankfully shies away from making any generalized decisions about Jamie but rather keeps all of his traits—the bear-hugging gregariousness, the blithe disingenuousness, the knee-jerk narcissism—compellingly and cleverly in play. Alongside Charles Grodin’s playfully deadpan take on the Crotchety Father-in-Law role and Maria Dizzia and Adam “A-Rock” Horovitz’s amusing duo of newbie parents-cum-concerned friends, Driver easily fares best opposite three co-stars who are either annoyingly hemmed-in by Baumbach, or else called upon to reiterate tired shticks.
Stiller’s best in the beginning, downplaying the tenseness and coming across as genuinely delighted by new friends and new feelings, but as the picture progresses, so too do the usual Stiller Hysterics, which both Baumbach’s direction and script (strangely pivoting around a conspiratorial, Broadcast News-ish question of professional ethics) all but demand from him. Meanwhile, Watts is refreshingly more relaxed than we’ve recently seen her, while Seyfried (stepping in for Greta Gerwig) proves to be an unexpected fount of pleasantly perceptive knowingness, but it helps neither that Baumbach is patently less interested in Darby’s and Cornelia’s personal arcs (which are both ultimately chalked up to problems of Wife-and/or-Motherhood) than he is in the inevitable Stiller-Driver showdown.
There’s an alarmingly ageist and almost entirely masculine anxiety on display here that the 45-year-old Baumbach has otherwise previously alluded to in relatively subtle and frankly more generous ways in prior projects. He was onto many of these same ideas about the Spoils of Youth and the Trials of Adulthood that While We’re Young just can’t help whingeing about, whether it be in the precariously cross-generational Stiller-Gerwig coupling at the center of Greenberg, or, most rewardingly, in The Squid and the Whale, in which the suffocating self-absorption of Jeff Daniels’ fading father could be seen as a last-ditch attempt to misguidedly influence a worshipful son and reclaim the glory of a career that had long-past-peaked.
Despite some gorgeous competition from Frances Ha, Squid and the Whale is still probably Baumbach’s best and most layered creation, able to fully realize the individual strains and interpersonal schisms between four specific members of one fracturing family. That this same writer-director poses himself a vaguely similar task of breaking down the tricky interrelations between four divergent individuals, and comes out with something that’s sufficiently entertaining but also superficially-conceived and bluntly-characterized is certainly a mark that something has changed. It’d be reductive to merely blame it on age, even if it increasingly seems for Baumbach, especially in this case, that age has everything to do with it. C+
While We’re Young was recently acquired at TIFF by A24 and is set for domestic release in 2015.