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Ben Stiller taps into middle age angst in While We’re Young
BSatchel Paige, who played major league baseball well into his 40’s, once famously said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” At the start of Noah Baumbach‘s insightful new comedy, While We’re Young, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) Srebnick do look back and find that middle age is gaining on them faster than they’d care to admit. The only question is what they’re going to do about it.
The problem is a bit more telling for Josh, since he’s a documentary producer with one critical success quite a few years back and a current project that’s not finished despite his continuing to work on it for ten years. However, they both feel something is missing in their lives but find what they think is the answer in a friendship with Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried) a mid-20’s couple who enjoy spending time with them despite the age and culture difference. However, this Fountain of Youth is fleeting, as Josh eventually realizes that Jamie is using the older couple as a stepping stone in his own filmmaking career.
While We’re Young marks a welcome return to form for both Stiller and Baumbach, both of whose careers bear certain resemblances to that of the fictional Josh. Stiller is vulnerable, not annoying here, and Baumbach has filled the movie with clever cultural and generational observations. A sequence in which Josh and Cornelia attend a New Age session that involves throwing up in a communal bucket is the funniest in the film. While We’re Young is also, almost by default, a welcome return for Charles Grodin, too seldom seen in recent years, who steals the film as Josh’s disapproving father-in-law who finds Jamie much more of a kindred spirit. The movie rambles on somewhat in its last 20 minutes, as if Baumbach couldn’t figure out just what points he wanted to make, but it closes on an appropriately sweet note. While We’re Young is an entertaining, insightful film to see for both the young and not-so-young.
In this scene, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts realize they’re being cut out of their older friends’ lives thanks to their spending time with a young couple. Our full review of While We’re Young is now available at Silver Screen Cinema.
Photo credit: “Ben Stiller” by Eva Rinaldi / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
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