WHILE WE’RE YOUNG: A Borderline Crowd Pleaser

No matter how good their circumstances are, many young people wish they were born in a different time, in a different place, belonging to a different generation they believe they fit in with more. This is almost definitely due to the influence of pop-culture; the 80’s weren’t exactly the best time to live in, yet show a John Hughes movie to any impressionable teenager and they will almost definitely long to have lived in that time period.

While We’re Young, the best film to date from director Noah Baumbach, takes a unique look at this theme in the space of one of the best movie montages in recent memory – whereas the young, hipster types long to live in an area of vinyls, VHS tapes and typewriters, the ageing are trying to stay relevant to today, filling their lives with useless technology in order to stay relevant in an ever changing society. Few movies are as perfect in showing the duality of ageing generations simultaneously distrusting the young whilst wishing they were young again – and even fewer are as funny and insightful as this.

The movie works because it never becomes quirky

Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) are a middle-aged couple stuck in a rut. They are the only pair in their friendship circle who don’t have a child to rejuvenate their marriage due to personal problems and any spark of creativity they once had has now gone. Josh has spent the last decade trying to make a documentary everybody deems boring and he can’t even summarise briefly – the funniest scene in the movie by a country mile is him pitching the movie to an uninterested investor. One of the films few flaws is that it never really explores Cornelia’s professional life, a shame as she is a fully realised character and by not doing so it feels like she is nothing more than the outdated trope of a stay-at-home housewife.

Both of them are given new leases of life by a chance meeting with Jamie and Darby (the ever brilliant Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) who attend one of Josh’s lectures. Jamie is a budding documentarian who cites Josh as an inspiration (he watched one of his documentaries via a VHS he bought on eBay) and Darby makes home made ice cream.

On paper, this sounds like a recipe for a toe-curling quirk-fest of the highest order, yet in execution the characters are fully realised to the point that you begin to understand why anybody would find the hipster culture appealing. Josh and Cornelia are audience surrogates, who look at the hipster culture of the young with a mix of wonder and awe; it marks the first time that hipster culture has been portrayed in a way that makes it seem quite fun to be a part of. Every quirky scenario in the movie’s earliest stages (Naomi Watts doing “hip-hop dancing”, Ben Stiller realising his youth by starting to wear funny hats) never comes across as quirky and more surprisingly, actually quite funny in the film.

Concepts like “funny old people dancing” and “funny hats” are so ingrained in the pantheons of terrible comedy ideas that is quite bizarre to see them handled in a way that’s actually amusing. In the movie’s second half, the movie takes a bizarre turn into borderline conspiracy thriller territory (I won’t say any more), yet it doesn’t feel like a jarring shift in tone – if anything, it underlines the movie’s central theme about the distrust of millennials.

Is this a feel-good movie in disguise?

In all honesty, I haven’t previously been a fan of director Noah Baumbach, with the exception of his 2005 movie The Squid and the Whale. The reason I liked that movie and no others in his filmography is due to it actually feeling contemptuous of its central characters and the upper middle-class Brooklynite culture they represent. His previous two movies, Greenberg (a rare non NYC-set Baumbach effort) and Frances Ha, were widely critically acclaimed, yet I didn’t like them due to it being sympathetic to characters who were fundamentally annoying and a tiny bit awful, with very little presented in the character development department. It felt like the characters around them were changing to adapt to their quirky personalities instead of the other way around.

While We’re Young feels like a correction of both of those movies, showing the effects that the care-free personalities of the hipster couple have on the responsible world around them (I would usually refrain from using the word “hipster”, but the movie does close with Jamie acknowledging he is one by stating that he “is of a certain age and wears tight jeans”). That it manages to do this whilst wholeheartedly embracing this culture is further proof that this may be Baumbach’s most empathetic movie to date, as well as his most purely enjoyable one.

Verdict

While We’re Young manages to be a feel-good, frequently funny comedy without ignoring the shifting emotional complexities (or lack thereof) of the central characters. Even if it feels at times very specific to a culture many viewers won’t relate to, the performances of Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts help turn it into a borderline crowd-pleaser that manages to do the one thing hipsters are stereotyped as hating – turning their culture mainstream. Yet with Jamie’s fandom of Lionel Richie and desire to make a hit mainstream documentary, maybe they don’t want to be on the fringes of society anymore. While We’re Young similarly doesn’t deserve to remain on the fringes, as beneath the quirks and the emotional manipulation that dominate the movie’s second half, there is a warm heart beneath it that is always in clear view.

Have you seen While We’re Young? Did you feel it was a feel good movie, or do you feel it had a mean streak in terms of it’s characterisation of the hipster characters?

While We’re Young is out now in the UK and US, all international release dates can be found here. 

(top image source: A24)