Ben Stiller spent years and God knows how many millions on his recent Walter Mitty remake, a statement movie that no one wanted to see. Noah Baumbach could’ve saved him the time, trouble, and expense—a dozen times over. The writer/director previously deployed Stiller’s peevish wit to fine effect in Greenberg (2010), and While We’re Young is a career-best comedy for them both: generous, wise, and finally consoling for those facing their forlorn 40s.
In outline, this is a Gen-X midlife-crisis movie: documentary filmmaker Josh (Stiller) and producer wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are stalled in careers and marriage. He can’t complete his weighty, unwatchable opus (something to do with geopolitics and a disheveled Chomskyian scholar, played by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary); together they’ve IVF’d once for kids, failed, and are settling into a staid, childless rut. They need a shakeup, and it arrives in the form of a spontaneous, fun-loving Brooklyn couple half their age: would-be documentarian Jamie (Adam Driver, from Girls) and wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried, recently seen in Lovelace and Les Miserables).
Jamie, who professes to love Josh’s prior work, is not what he seems, but such third-act revelations are best unmentioned here. While We’re Young sends cynical Josh into unexpected bromance, and much of the movie’s charm lies in our being swept along, too. Jamie freshens his newfound mentor’s perspective on film, revamps his wardrobe, and invites him into new, more adventurous social circles. (One, with musician Dean Wareham presiding as a shaman, involves an ayahuasca ceremony and copious vomiting; the physical humor here is broader than in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale.) The appeal for Cornelia is more diffuse: Oppressed by the Park Slope mommy cult, she’s liberated by the younger couple to take hip-hop dance classes. Still, the female characters aren’t so skillfully drawn as the males, who include gray-muzzled new father Fletcher (the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horowitz), the only guy who can speak truth to Josh’s blind infatuation. Charles Grodin also brings welcome, sour appeal as Josh’s disapproving father-in-law, who lords his filmmaking success over him.
Is Josh deluded and ridiculous? Of course he is, and yet that’s not the movie’s real source of laughter and inspiration. In denial about his fading eyesight and arthritis, Josh will discover that being foolish and confounded is good for the system, a tonic. If Jamie is a hustler, he’s also like a personal trainer—pushing his client (who forever picks up the lunch tab) into discomfort. As the two collaborate on a doc about a PTSD veteran/children’s-birthday-party clown, the younger man rejects Josh’s purist ethics, yet Baumbach doesn’t condemn this comic betrayal or reward Josh’s outrage. More than a generational clash, this is a satire of an entire class of narcissists (the director perhaps included).
By the time Cornelia and Josh have woken from their spell, they’ve absorbed the movie’s best gag and fundamental irony: Accepting that you’re old takes no less imagination than pretending you’re young.
bmiller@seattleweekly.com
WHILE WE’RE YOUNG Opens Fri., April 10 at Sundance, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, & Lincoln Square. Rated R. 94 minutes.
