Like a lot of writer-directors with a natural gift for comedy, Noah Baumbach has spent a lot of his filmmaking career trying not to be too funny. Baumbach's a whiz with a one-liner, and he populates his films with characters who talk just past each other, keeping up a running commentary on everything they see and feel. But to balance the banter, Baumbach movies like Greenberg, Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale tend to focus on failures and sourpusses whose almost pathological unhappiness works against the gags.
What makes Baumbach's new film While We're Young so refreshing — at least initially — is that it's densely packed with jokes, and clearly means to be a crowd-pleaser. Ben Stiller stars as a documentary filmmaker named Josh who's spent years working on an abstract piece about war and politics. When he and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) meet the young hipster couple Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried), they return to being the cool, fun, creative people they were in their 20s: trying artisanal foods and strange drugs, remaining open to new experiences. Much like Baumbach's magnificent 2013 film Frances Ha, While We're Young partially celebrates the plucky spirit of New York's rising generation.
Or at least that's how the movie begins. Baumbach didn't co-write While We're Young with his recent romantic/creative partner Greta Gerwig (with whom he collaborated on Frances Ha and the equally sunny upcoming comedy Mistress America), which may explain the dispiriting mistrust of youth that creeps into the picture. As Josh goes from admiring Jamie's "shoot and upload a film in a week" industriousness to questioning his new friend's values, While We're Young becomes oddly preachy about what's wrong with the kids today. Making matter worse, Baumbach adds a contrived plot twist that feels like one too many concessions to the mainstream — as though he were trying to filter one of his typically loose collections of vignettes and observations into a conventional narrative that makes an obvious point.
Still, even a streamlined (and intermittently mean) Baumbach movie is smarter and funnier than just about anything else in theaters. While We're Young paints Jamie and Darby as alien and sinister, but it's uncommonly wise about how Josh and Cornelia feel as childless professionals in their 40s, worried that they have no legacy and no remaining cultural currency. As Josh bounces between Jamie and an older stay-at-home-dad friend (charmingly played by Beastie Boys' Adam Horowitz), while Cornelia tries to convince herself that she's happy being a middle-aged woman with options, While We're Young hits the same comedic sweet spot between cutting and empathetic that the best Baumbachs do.
Ultimately, this film is about two well-meaning people coming to grips with who they actually are versus who they've always thought they were supposed to be. And when it's on a roll, While We're Young is hilarious, whether Baumbach is marveling at a generation that's turned The Goonies and Lionel Richie into pop treasures, or he's poking fun at a befuddled older filmmaker who excuses his unfocused, inaccessible, decade-in-the-making documentary by saying it's "about America."
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