![]() ![]() This is a film rooted in Baumbach’s own neuroses about filmmaking and truth, about authenticity and ethics.ĭom: The whole categorising of people by generations is so lazy, it’s about as accurate as astrology. Despite intergenerational discord being at the center of the film’s narrative, it is ultimately not what While We’re Young is about. I was asked to write about whether Baumbach’s latest film is an accurate portrayal of youth and the generational dynamics between the twentysomethings and their fortysomething counterparts. The characters are bathed in stereotypes attributed to New Yorkers of their age groups: from the hip-hop classes, to the mommy-and-me music lessons, to the expensive apartments that are paid for with undisclosed sources of income. They are twee mason jars, personified.īut then again, I found none of Baumbach’s characters particularly sympathetic, which has much to do with the artifice Baumbach indulges in, in his heavy-handed treatment of age. Their indulgence in a nostalgia for an analogue existence they never actually lived is grating: from watching VHS tapes, to exclusively listening to vinyl, to tapping away on a typewriter, Jamie, Darby (Amanda Seyfried) and their friend Tipper (she of the ironic shirts: “Some college I never went to” “Some crappy band”) – are contrived and conceited. He was simply young.Ĭertainly, there are no redeeming qualities to be found in any of the younger characters. He wasn’t a selfish, unattractively ambitious, narcissistic manipulator. With this, we are supposed to forgive all of Jamie’s (Driver) transgressions – as Josh has – because he is simply young. This supposedly insightful comment Josh makes to his wife (Naomi Watts) as the fortysomething pair are en route to Port-au-Prince to adopt a child – the apotheosis of their smug and seemingly unfulfilled lives. That compassion, even with all the criticism, keeps the film human.Watch a video review of the film Guardian As one of his friends tells Josh, a middle-aged man in a funky hat is still a middle-aged man – he just looks sillier.īaumbach has a great sense of the ridiculous, and a sensitive instinct for keeping the attack under control. Meanwhile, his exploration of this age and stage is wryly funny, acute and sometimes close enough to discomfit. I guess in 20 years he'll make a film about how they weren't really so bad, and the realisation that your parents were right in some of the things they told you. they worry about surfaces, they have no ethics. Social media junkies, incapable of deep thought, fired by self-interest rather than altruism, they groove on celebrity. Soon they are doing exercise classes together, powered by aggressive hip-hop.īaumbach mounts a fairly comprehensive demolition of the generation coming up behind his own. Cornelia is more sceptical, but Darby's generosity wins her over. The two couples hang out, doing stuff that makes Josh feel young again. And he's very impressed that Cornelia is the daughter of a really famous filmmaker, played by Charles Grodin. Jamie wants to be a filmmaker too he has seen Josh's earlier films and loved them. Two generations collide and Josh finds it invigorating. Their complacency is shattered by the invasion of two 25-year-olds, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a young couple who seem as free-wheeling and funky as Josh and Cornelia used to be. The comparisons between Allen and Baumbach are too obvious to mention.īen Stiller chases after his youth in While We're Young. Frances Ha was shot in black and white, like Woody Allen's Manhattan. That was co-written with his then partner, Jennifer Jason Leigh. He and Gerwig were by then together, after they fell in love while making Greenberg, in which she starred. His last film, Frances Ha, was a funny and affectionate piece about a young woman's flowering in New York, co-written with Greta Gerwig, the star of the film. Most of the people in his films are versions of himself and people he knows – the East Coast educated elite – but he avoids becoming narcissistic by being acerbic and funny – and by engaging deeply with those characters who are not him, but fascinating to him. His debut film, Kicking and Screaming, from 1995, was about a group of college graduates trying to figure out their future by talking about it. He has made a film about his childhood in Brooklyn, through the prism of his parents' divorce ( The Squid and the Whale). More than most, the American director Noah Baumbach is obsessed with ages and stages.
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