While We're Young

So I get what the film was aiming for, but I've gotta say, I'm incredibly shocked by its critical reception. I don't think it's "bad", really, but just thoroughly mediocre and really obnoxious. I don't know why, but something about it came off so incredibly forced and fake. It has some good acting and none of it is offensive or anything, but something about it annoyed me in a way I can't really pinpoint. I love Naomi Watts, but she was part of the problem. There just wasn't any synchrony between the performers I don't think. Either that or between their performances and the tone the film was aiming for. I'm perplexed because none of it I can really put my finger on, except that there is absolutely nothing of real note or anything that will be memorable even a day after watching it (well, that's not true, since I saw it a day ago). Not worth it

I am imagining that the logline when this was initially pitched was something like "This is 40 with deeper, darker, insights." Or something.

And on paper that sounds really cool. The casting is also great, at least on paper. Plus, as we all know, Woody Allen has shown that these sorts of films can find an audience, and make money.

So on paper this was pure magic.

In real life? Not so much.

1. First, let's stop giving Woody Allen credit for inventing these sorts of films. He actually revived what used to a form of stage play called "comedies of Manners" and more or less built a second (spectacular) a career on that. This is a comedy of Manners. No more and no less.

2. Naomi Watts is solid, as is Seyfried. Ben Stiller, one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, seems a little lost here, as though he can't quite find the right note for his character. Plus -- the casting director should have noticed -- he has a prematurely aged face, that is, he always looks older than he is. That does not help his character, or the audience, at all.

3.The pacing is not merely bad, it is terrible. The dialog and story in this specific comedy of Manners are not sharp enough to carry the viewer through the slow bits. Plus, it does not help that Stiller's character, who plays a "failed film-maker," loves to rhapsodize about how "boring films eventually get interesting." If that was an inside joke, it is in bad taste.

4. The only "fun" bit in the entire film? At the 1:00 minute mark precisely, Naomi Watts mimics her Russian character from Saint Vincent. I smiled. That was the only smile the movie offered.

5. In the opinion of this reviewer, the entire overlong and convoluted sub-arc about the nature of film and documentaries (what is real, what is staged? etc) must have seemed clever during the first draft, sort of a Joss Whedonesque deconstruction of the medium (like Cabin in the Woods) but, as the film plays, it simply drags down deeper a story which is already drowning in its own self-awareness and navel-gazing.

Josh (Ben Stiller) is a documentary filmmaker at a crossroads in his career after having made a good debut feature. His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a producer with a famous father as a documentary filmmaker (Charles Grodin). Now crawling towards middle age, the couple seem unfulfilled somewhat, as they are unable to have a child, unlike most of their close friends.

Enter tyro filmmaker Jamie Fletcher (Adam Driver) and his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried), two twentysomethings who not only appear full of life, but seem willing to look up to Josh as an example of a competent filmmaker. Jamie embarks on his career, and never looks back.

Noah Baumbach's film has strong echoes of ALL ABOUT EVE, with the scheming Jamie trying every trick in the book to advance himself at Josh's expense, while pretending to be friendly. Yet WHILE WE'RE YOUNG manages to make some important points about the angst associated with middle age: Josh wants to be young once more, and is prepared to ape Jamie's mode of dress, as well as trying to enjoy the youngsters' leisure pursuits. Neither prove very satisfying for the older filmmaker, and in the end he comes to acknowledge the fact of growing old.

Yet Baumbach also has some trenchant points to make about the documentary filmmaker's art. Do they exist to record life around them - as Leslie (Grodin) claims in a climactic speech, or do they cut corners and fabricate life in search of a good story? What is a "good" story anyway? The film has great fun skewering some of Josh's more pretentious flights of fancy as he struggles to finish a six and a half hour documentary that has already taken him ten years. He has written something far too long and boring (it's clear that Baumbach would never be a fan of the work of Claude Lanzmann, whose SHOAH lasts almost the same length of time).

Yet Baumbach never lets the action get too serious. The script is full of witty lines, and the performances are cleverly drawn. The New York locations also provide an effective backdrop to the action, with the seedy filmmakers' studios contrasting with the opulence of Lincoln Center.

It feels as if we're back in "Greenburg" territory with "While We're Young" made four years later, since we have the same writer and director (Noah Baumbach) and the same lead actor (Ben Stiller) playing a similar central character. This time, Stiller is Josh, married to Cornelia (Naomi Watts), a middle-aged married couple who find themselves hooking up with Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a couple in their twenties, who remind the older pair of the freshness and spontaneity of youth while he struggles professionally and she laments their inability to become parents.

The female roles are underwritten and, while Driver is good, this is really Stiller's film. The trouble is that he is such an irritating character, unable to complete a long-running project to produce a boring documentary and foolishly trying to recapture his lost youth. There are some funny scenes and situations, but this is an uneven work with a sequence at a hippy retreat proving particularly silly.

I saw the trailers for this, thought it looked funny and i like Stiller so gave it a whirl. What a mistake! This is not the comedy the trailers made it out to be, they show the best bits and when it came to watching the whole film it fell flat. This film was trying to be an intellectual dark comedy, maybe in the vein of Woody Allen but lacked the style, sophistication and plot. The mid life crisis thing, done many times before but better, the role reversal with the oldies doing the social media thing and the younger couple living like hippie bohemians felt like an attempt to be clever but just didn't feel real. The whole moral conscience thing Stiller had was muddled because of the way the plot didn't really make out that anyone had done anything very much wrong. This was deliberate but made the whole morality issue just too subtle for the audience to care. At the end i couldn't care less whether they had a baby together or not and found it all very irritating. I know it was supposed to be allegorical and therefore clever but to me at least it was just badly done and a bit pretentious.