While We’re Young

Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Driver
Length: 97 minutes
Country: USA

While We’re Young (2014) is the type of film Woody Allen would make if he still possessed the acidic wit displayed in his late 70’s output. Surprisingly, Noah Baumbach is the director of this anti-hipster ‘dramedy’; a film focused on a forty-something couple’s inability to accept ageing and the often amusing, but ultimately troubling, consequences of this.

I say ‘surprisingly’ because Baumbach, along with Wes Anderson, co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009); two films regarded as excessively twee by most contemporary critics. With While We’re Young, it seems as if Baumbach is out to satirise the modern hipster generation he helped create and expose them for what they are – frauds.

This ground has been covered before, most recently with Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 (2012), except Baumbach isn’t particularly interested in sentimentality. Are we supposed to feel sympathy towards inactive documentarian Josh (Ben Stiller) as he struggles through a mid-life crisis? I’m not so convinced. This is partly because Josh himself isn’t convinced; does he partake in a mystic ceremony involving a shaman because he genuinely wants to ‘discover some shit’ about life or simply because he’s following the example of a younger generation? In the characters of Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), Baumbach sculpts a pair of modern-age hipsters who are both relatable and nauseating to any twenty-something in the 21^st century. Typewriters, board games, VHS tapes, vinyl records and … homemade marzipan-flavoured ice cream (yes, that’s right) act as identifiers for this couple. Interestingly enough, Netflix, smart phones and apple laptops are the objects most associated with Josh and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts). As the older couple adapt to the younger couple’s way of life, the audience is invited more and more to laugh at Josh and Cornelia; they attempt Hip-Hop dance workouts, treks on deserted railway tracks and questionable fashion statements (ok, it’s only a hat).

The truth is that it’s not cool to watch VHS tapes with crappy picture quality or casually refer to Eisenstein’s soviet montage theory in conversation when you’re not genuinely invested or interested in it.

All of this is greatly amusing but Baumbach seems to be getting at something; the problem is that the film’s tonally uneven final half hour makes it difficult to see exactly what that is. Josh’s discovery of the fraudulent nature of Jamie’s most recent documentary film also serves as a discovery of the falseness behind Jamie’s hipster way of life and consequently, the unfaithfulness of Josh and Cornelia’s. The irony of Josh’s job being a way of finding truth and objectivity in a world of superficiality, whilst he concurrently pursues a life of falseness with Jamie and Darby isn’t lost on the viewer, but it maybe takes a while for the character to understand it himself. This tonal shift from relaxed comedy to intense exposé is quite jarring even though it eventually serves to accentuate the major themes at play within the film. The truth is that it’s not cool to watch VHS tapes with crappy picture quality or casually refer to Eisenstein’s soviet montage theory in conversation when you’re not genuinely invested or interested in it. It’s acceptable to act your age, have arguments with your partner and enjoy listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (a joke that I’m still not entirely sure works but I’ll let it slide).

In a film with such a detached, ‘smart’ sense of humour, it may seem a little cute that the overall message is to be yourself, but it’s so well-written and well-acted that you’re left smiling by the end. As Josh and Cornelia stare puzzled at a young child sending a tweet, you can’t help but ponder your own journey into adulthood and question what it means to be ‘grown up’.