WHILE WE’RE YOUNG, Noah Baumbach’s comedic mid-life crisis film rotates around a bromance between Josh, a mid forties documentary maker and film lecturer played by Ben Stiller, and his new buddy, the cool mid twenties student Jamie, played by Adam Driver.
Baumbach has been praised for insight into the generation gap between Generation X and the rise of the Millennials. The lead actors, Ben Stiller, Adam Driver, Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried, aim to portray this well. Yet the setting, storyline and characters tend to constrain any genuine character development The characters are stereotypical, white and privileged.
They have expensive New York apartments, there are ‘mommy-and-me’ music lessons for mothers and babies, hip-hop classes and black-tie dinners. Jamie demonstrates privileged narcissism and manipulative behaviours and this is forgiven because he is just being young.
As an upcoming documentary-maker searching for his big break, Jamie breaks from Josh’s ‘traditional’ perspective that documentaries are about truth and reality and that ethics mean there should be no deviation from this. Ultimately it is this conflict, more than the inter-generational one, which drives this film.
Josh is floundering. He and his wife Cornelia, played by Naomi Watts, claim to rejoice in the freedom of their childless status, which allows for spontaneity. Yet Josh’s ten year film project has not encouraged much uninhibitedness. This is in stark contrast to Jamie who finishes editing a film shoot in a couple of days.
An additional generation, in Josh’s highly acclaimed father-in-law Leslie Breitbart, played by Charles Grodin, also highlights Josh’s materialistic inadequacies and lack of success.
A strange added attraction of Jamie and his girlfriend Darby, played by Amanda Seyfried, is that they have adopted a technologically anachronistic collection of artefacts including vinyl records and typewriters – stuff that Josh and Cornelia would have thrown out years ago. To the Generation X couple, nostalgia equals identification and perceived closeness of interests and friendship.
As a result of confronting youth and their mid-life crisis whilst their friends are having babies, Josh and Cornelia finally cut loose from their childless self absorbed free existence, relent and seek overseas adoption. Perhaps this is to fulfil a need or merely to conform to ‘having children’. The message here appears to be that parenting may be the only true measure of adulthood.
Whilst the film is quite watchable, one is left with a feeling of – well who really cares about Josh and his generation’s angst. This is particularly true if you are not a Gen X yourself, and if you are childless and content.