Review // While We’re Young

In Noah Baumbach’s newest While We’re Young, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as Josh and Cornelia, a New York based documentary film-maker and his successful film producer wife. The happily married 40-something couple see their social life take an abrupt shift when their best friends Marina (Maria Dizzia) and Fletcher (Adam Horovitz) have a baby. Having “lost their friends to the baby” Josh and Cornelia are oddly welcoming of a young couple who befriend them. Adam Driver plays aspiring documentary film-maker Jamie while Amanda Seyfried plays his wife, the free spirited ice cream maker Darby.

Inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s 1893 play The Master Builder, the film is – at its core – a commentary on youth and age identity. Josh and Cornelia are caught between something they want and can’t have (a baby) and the thrill of youthful experiences brought on by their new younger friends. Embracing Jamie and Darby’s bohemian lifestyle in the heart of Bushwick, the older couple are ostracized by their age appropriate friends who chastise them for not acting their age. On the flip side as much as they enjoy their taste of hipsterdom – the youth are still puzzling to them. Is it possible for Josh and Cornelia to fit in either world? Jamie and Darby are equally infatuated by their new friends, who remind them of their parents while still being cool and interesting.

The acting is superb. Stiller and Watts shine in the delightfully different coming of age tale. Driver is stellar as the charismatic Jamie while Seyfried shows real emotional depth with a character that’s constantly overshadowed by her partner. But this film is truly a testament to a fantastic script that explores the phenomenon of “embracing your age” which effects everyone at sometime or another.

Josh has a line in the film “for the first time in my life, I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a child imitating an adult” which really struck a chord with me – as I haven’t quite gotten out of that particular habit. Full disclosure, Baumbach is one of my favourite storytellers and I can often identify with him, despite that fact that he is a 45 year-old American man. I find his quiet, slightly neurotic, but incredibly warm style comforting. While he might not always write about what he knows, even his most fanciful screenplays (Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Life Aquatic) are very sincere. So much so that I expect he is actually an expert in submarine travel and foxes. To me the achievement of While We’re Young isn’t in its well structured plot, its fitting conclusion or strong characters, it’s that the film gives modern expression to an otherwise indescribable feeling: that age might just be an impossible state of being.

Reviewed by Vithiya Murugadas.