WHILE WE'RE YOUNG: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at an indie art house near me:

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG

(Dir. Noah Baumbach, 2015)

“We were just 25. I mean, we weren’t, but you know,” 44-year old Josh (Ben Stiller) says to his 43-year old wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) when she asks why he suddenly wants to hang out with a couple of 25-year olds.

In writer/director Noah Baumbach’s (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, FRANCES HA) eighth film, WHILE WE'RE YOUNG, these aging Brooklynites find themselves attracted to the hipster lifestyles of Jamie (Adam Driver from the HBO show Girls), and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). This is after it’s been well established that Josh and Cornelia’s decision not to have children alienates them from their new-parent friends Fletcher (Adam Horowitz aka Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys) and Marina (Maria Dizzia).

Josh, a documentary filmmaker of little renown, is initially approached by Jamie and Darby after a class Josh teaches on filmmaking for a continuing education program. Jamie, an aspiring documentarian himself, tells Josh he loves his work (he bought an obscure VHS copy of Josh’s only film on eBay), and before you know it, Jamie and Darby are schmoozing it up with Josh and Cornelia.

An amusing montage displays how the older couple depends on their modern devices (iPhones, iPods, laptops, etc,) while the young ones revel in the retro (vinyl, VHS, typewriters, etc.). We also see Josh shopping for vintage threads with Jamie, while Cornelia bonds with Darby, whose thing is making organic artisanal ice-cream, over a hip hop dance class.

Dining with Fletcher and Marina, Josh and Cornelia rave about their new friends. Cornelia describes Jamie and Darby’s apartment as being filled with “everything we once threw out, but it looks so good the way they have it.” Josh enthusiastically adds: “you should see this guy’s record collection. It’s Jay-Z, it’s Thin Lizzy, it’s Mozart. His taste is democratic - it’s THE GOONIES and it’s CITIZEN KANE. They don't distinguish between high and low. It’s wonderful.”

Fletcher responds, “When did THE GOONIES become a good movie?” I myself have been wondering that for years.

Conflict comes when Jamie starts cozying up with Cornelia’s father, famous filmmaker Leslie Breitbart (the great, grumpy Charles Grodin), who used to mentor Josh. This makes Josh realize that his new young friend’s motivations may be questionable, as is the content of his project when it’s revealed that Jamie fudged the timeline and the Facebook angle that led to his documentary’s subject, a suicidal war veteran played by Brady Corbet.

Unfortunately this development comes off a bit contrived making the confrontational conclusion at Leslie’s memorial ceremony at Lincoln Center a bit clunky, but the overall gist of the observational humor, and drama, here is dead on.

In 2010’s GREENBURG, Baumbach and Stiller less successfully approached similar themes, but here they largely nail the unsettling feeling that fortysomething folks have coming to terms with the fact that, as Springsteen famously sang, “we ain’t so young anymore.”

Stiller, who is closer to 50 than his screen counterpart, has made a career of playing uptight characters challenged to break out of their shells, but his Josh may be the actor’s most fleshed out, and vulnerable performance. It beats the pants off of WALTER MITTY, that's for sure.

Co-stars Watts, Grodin, and Seyfried also shine, but Driver, building upon the artsy inclinations of his character on Girls, really stands out. His Jamie sharply captures the soullessness of a guy who’s spent his entire existence faking sincerity.

Such meddling millennials sure can make members of Generation X like me feel old, but Baumbach’s smart and dryly funny take on the situation in WHILE WE'RE YOUNG, helps to ease the blow.

More later...

GREENBERG: The Film Babble Blog Review

GREENBERG (Dir. Noah Baumbach, 2010)

"I'm really trying to do nothing for a while," Robert Greenberg (Ben Stiller) says repeatedly throughout this low key independent film that matches his nothing scene by scene.

Stiller's acerbic misanthropic New Yorker title character is house-sitting for his brother (Chris Medina) in LA and starts and stops, and starts and stops again, an awkward romance with Greta Gerwig as his brother's personal assistant. That's basically it plot wise. It's a series of scenes in which we cringe anticipating how exactly Stiller will socially sabotage every given situation.

And that really doesn't make for entertaining movie going. It seemed so promising at first. The possibilities of tapping into Stiller's talent for comic anger without cheap laughs, a la what PUNCH DRUNK LOVE did for Adam Sandler, could make for a iconic assessment, but the discomfort that supporting cast members Rhys Ifans and Jennifer Jason Leigh (who is credited for the story - a baffling credit since there barely is one) convey is contagious.

Greenberg, the character, is simply not interesting. He was once a musician that botched a record deal for his band that he's never owned up to, and his so called friends barely tolerate him. He writes complaint letters to every commercial institution that he comes across from American Airlines to Starbucks. And now he can't figure out if he wants to pursue a relationship with a 26 year old woman who is also floating through life with no direction.

You'd think that she'd see that this guy is just an asshole and move on, but maybe there's some actual realism there. Realism may be the film's problem. I mean, Greenberg all too well reminds me of former friends who I stopped hanging out with because they were way too negative and boring.

Many of Stiller's jerk wad exchanges just brought to mind the many times I disgustedly hung up the phone with such folk. When I realized halfway through that this guy was never going to change, and there was no point to this slice of his dull life, I wanted to hang up on the movie.

Underwritten and un-affecting; it's a charmless movie about a charmless man. It has echoes of James L. Brook's AS GOOD AS IT GETS which similarly dealt with a socially inept curmudgeon begrudgingly accepting love. That film though had more witty life to it - GREENBERG just sits there. Oh, I should say that Baumbach tries to combat the underlining nothing with a desperate party sequence with snarky kids, drugs, and loud music in the last third.

I like the work of Noah Baumbach a lot more than say Armond White, but here this particular spotlight on self absorption really needed more going for it than just these bare bones slightly spruced up with James Murphy's (LCD Soundsystem) soundtrack (which isn't bad actually).

When asked how he's doing early on, Stiller quips: "Fair to middling, Leonard Maltin would give me 2 and 1/2 stars." If I used a star rating I'd be way less generous.

More later...