While We’re Young
Noah Baumbach (2014)
In Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010), the choleric title character Roger Greenberg and his friend Ivan are in a restaurant. Roger’s comments about their fellow diners prompt Ivan to quote George Bernard Shaw’s epigram ‘Youth is wasted on the young’. The baton of jaundiced ephebiphobia is passed from Shaw to Ibsen at the start of Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young. It’s introduced by legends on the screen – excerpts from The Master Builder, in which Halvard Solness expresses his fear of ‘youth knocking on the door’. The advent of Hilde Wangel vindicates Solness’s fear. Josh, the forty-something protagonist of While We’re Young, is relatively incautious. He welcomes a member of the younger generation into his life and discovers he’s invited a burglar onto the premises.
Josh (Ben Stiller) is a New York-based documentarian, whose approach to his art is politically earnest rather than productive: his latest film (‘It’s about power in America really …’) has been in the works for years – Josh refuses to compromise by trimming it to watchable length. His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is the daughter of Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), a stellar figure in the documentary film world. Josh has a tense relationship with Leslie; Cornelia is her father’s production assistant. After giving a lecture at a college where he has a part-time appointment, Josh is approached by two members of the audience, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), who look to be in their late twenties. Jamie expresses admiration for Josh’s work and Leslie’s more extensive oeuvre, and mentions his own ambitions to make documentaries. Josh is immediately smitten with Jamie – his praise, his poise, his enthusiasm – and this is the beginning of a friendship between the two couples. Within a very short space of time (certainly of screen time), Josh and Cornelia are seeing Jamie and Darby to the virtual exclusion of any of their contemporaries. The older couple accept the youngsters’ invitation to go with them on a consciousness-raising weekend, during which Cornelia, under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, mistakes Jamie for Josh and kisses the younger man. To get his own documentary made, Jamie exploits both Josh’s goodwill and his family connections; to increase its dramatic impact, Jamie falsifies the facts of how his film was created. This combination of personal and artistic betrayals brings Josh, and his marriage, to breaking point.
Roger Greenberg was just about infantile in his egocentrism. He couldn’t function in the ‘grown-up’ world to which he was meant to belong. The eponymous heroine of Noah Baumbach’s next film Frances Ha had a similar problem. On the face of it, Josh and Cornelia are more successful adults – at least, they’ve been married to each other for a good few years and they more or less earn a living. As his friendship with Jamie disappoints and sours, however, Josh‘s petulant exasperation recalls Roger’s and, when he and Cornelia are eventually reconciled, both admit they’ve always felt like children pretending to be grown-ups. What distinguishes Josh and Cornelia from friends their own age, and gives them kinship with Roger and Frances, is their childlessness. Josh and Cornelia have tried unsuccessfully to have a baby; Cornelia insists she no longer wants one because she can’t face the agony of miscarriage again. At the start of While We’re Young, we see them engaging smilingly but uneasily with the new baby of Marina (Maria Dizzia) and Fletcher (Adam Horovitz, aka Ad-Rock), their best friends until now. At the end of the film, ‘one year later’, the relationship with Jamie and Darby is over and it’s Marina and Fletcher who drop Josh and Cornelia off at the airport, telling them they’ll ‘be great parents’. Josh and Cornelia are en route to Haiti adopt a child. As they wait for their flight, they read a magazine article about the celebrity Jamie has become through his documentary, telling themselves that, ‘He’s not evil, he’s just young’. (There’s no indication of whether, twelve months on, Josh’s film is any nearer to or further from completion.) A very young child sits opposite them in the departure lounge, manipulating an iPhone at great speed. Josh and Cornelia watch him with looks of apprehensive amazement.
In Greenberg, the needy, misanthropic central character dominated to such an extent that Noah Baumbach made it very difficult for himself to resolve matters in a way that didn’t seem either false or unduly miserable – but he came close to succeeding. In this new picture, there’s a tension between the main individuals and the moral of the story. Baumbach is too sophisticated a film-maker to do simple happy endings but While We’re Young seems to say that having children is a kind of salvation. (Baumbach, who has a son from his marriage to Jennifer Jason Leigh, repeatedly uses the same Vivaldi concerto that scored Kramer vs Kramer, a notorious tale of the maturing of a professionally-driven personality and the making of a father. The choice of music may or may not be coincidental.) Josh and Cornelia become estranged from Fletcher and Marina not just because Jamie and Darby have arrived on the scene but because Fletcher and Marina are now primarily parents. In a less than persuasive episode, Josh and Cornelia make a surprise call on their old friends only to find that other people are arriving at the apartment – for a party to which Josh and Cornelia haven’t been invited. It’s just about believable that Fletcher and Marina might have worried that Josh and Cornelia would feel out of place in a room full of couples who are parents – less credible that Cornelia and Marina have an argument there and then about how they’ve grown apart.
Baumbach tries to guard against the parenthood-equals-fulfilment message becoming facile through a subsequent scene in which Fletcher expresses to Josh his feelings of dissatisfaction about becoming a house-husband-and-father – but this exchange is itself too pat. What’s more fundamentally unconvincing in While We’re Young is that Josh’s and Cornelia’s lives, because they have no children, are presented as empty of anything but their work. Their lack of achievement is reflected not only in Josh’s failure to complete his film; the couple don’t even get round to going on holidays. For their situation to be credible, you need to accept, and I couldn’t, that Josh rules the roost – rather as Greta Gerwig’s Florence in Greenberg was inevitably saddled with Roger. Compared with Florence, Cornelia is, however, a relatively underwritten character. Perhaps working with her distinguished father is meant to signal her lack of autonomy and her immaturity but it must give Cornelia access to a world larger than Josh. Her apparent subservience to her husband’s will doesn’t make sense.
It’s possible that my own fear of youth affected my reading of Adam Driver’s Jamie but it seems pretty obvious from the start that he’s a user – and certain from the moment Josh picks up the bill after the two couples have eaten together in a restaurant. Jamie clearly sees the free meal as his due. There’s a suggestion late on in the film that Josh saw Jamie as a ‘documentarian son’ but Jamie doesn’t flatter enough in the early stages of their relationship for you to accept that the already prickly and defensive Josh would be so easily taken in. Or that he’d be seduced by the accoutrements of what he’s meant to see as Jamie’s and Darby’s youthful independence of behaviour and taste: they report that ‘we said our vows in an empty water tower in Harlem’; their retro possessions including a huge vinyl record collection. (The tour of their apartment, although rather too neat a summary of their lifestyle, is an amusingly dynamic piece of filming.) Cornelia doesn’t share Josh’s immediate enthusiasm for Jamie but she isn’t given the opportunity to explain her reservations and these seem to disappear in a way that’s more convenient to the writer-director than it is convincing. Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) was afflicted by a similar discrepancy between what the central character couldn’t discern and the viewer could plainly see: in that film, it was obvious to anyone but the teenager played by Jesse Eisenberg that the father he admired was contemptible.
Ben Stiller’s portrait of Roger Greenberg came as a powerful surprise to me back in 2010. Casting him as Josh naturally reinforces the sense of continuity from Greenberg to While We’re Young and Stiller gives another good performance. He has less opportunity here for emotional extravagance but that’s not a problem. In fact, the occasional funny-sad set pieces – Josh sprinting on roller-blades to the Lincoln Center and bursting into the celebration of Leslie’s life and work being held there in order to expose Jamie’s film-making fakery – are among the weaker parts of the movie. There’s something glazed and disconnected about Josh when he’s talking to people other than Cornelia (and, for a while, Jamie). He doesn’t command confidence and this gives a depth to confrontations that would otherwise be no more than broad satirical comedy. An example is Josh’s abortive pitch of his film to a hedge fund investor (Ryan Serhant). Stiller captures very well here Josh’s mixture of conscience and egoism. He asks ‘Hedge Fund Dave’ (as he’s called in the cast list) if he knows what proportion of America’s black male population is in prison; Dave shrugs and guesses 60%. Josh is horrified by the suit’s stunning ignorance but also annoyed that Dave has stolen his thunder. Josh had been all ready to shock him with the actual figure of 9% – and is determined to deliver this intended coup de grâce regardless. This is a dismayingly funny moment.
It gradually dawns on Josh that Jamie is stealing, among other things, his own past – including, at one point, an advertising jingle from Josh’s youth. I especially liked the bit when Josh, riding in a car with Jamie, Cornelia and Darby, wants to impersonate the voice from this jingle to maximum effect: he waits to ensure no interruptions from the others, who receive his impression in silence. (Later, alone with Cornelia, Josh reprises the voice, as if to prove and console himself.) Jamie’s shameless success versus Josh’s dogged lack of it brings to mind the opposition of the television producer Lester (Alan Alda) and the documentarian Cliff (Woody Allen) in Crimes and Misdemeanors. There are times in While We’re Young when you feel that someone as volubly aggrieved as Woody Allen’s Cliff is needed to maintain the comic energy of the piece. There are also times when you feel that Ben Stiller is achieving something more subtle than Allen did.
Naomi Watts, despite the limitations of her role, is excellent as Cornelia. When Darby takes her to a hip-hop dance class, Cornelia has sexual fantasies to get into the swing of things; this resonates in a later sequence when she’s doing hip-hop practice at home. Watts’s hyper-energetic movement is very amusing here and she plays the big row between Cornelia and Josh with a poignant blend of wit and pain, ringing different notes with the repetitions of ‘Fuck you!’ in the argument. If Cornelia is an underdeveloped character, Darby, who makes artisanal ice cream, is barely there on the page at all: until Darby gets sick of Jamie’s self-centredness and tells Josh what happened between their spouses on the mystical happening weekend (which goes on for much too long), Baumbach gives Amanda Seyfried virtually nothing to do. Charles Grodin is eighty years old this month and shows wonderful comic maturity as Leslie. Baumbach gives him some good lines – such as Leslie’s repeated references in conversation to the upcoming Lincoln Center ‘memorial’ event for him, which reminds him that he’s still alive. He makes the same joke in his response to the tributes he receives at the event itself and gets an uneasy polite laugh from the audience. This is the best bit of the Lincoln Center episode – in other respects it’s a forced climax to the percolating conflicts of the story.
Jamie happily accepts Josh’s help in furthering his own film project, which is sparked, so Jamie tells Josh, by connecting via Facebook with an old schoolfriend, Kent (Brady Corbet). Josh googles the name and discovers that Kent is in hospital following an attempted suicide. When Josh and Jamie visit Kent, he explains that he’s a former soldier, traumatised by what he experienced on a US army tour of Afghanistan. Josh’s long-suffering, largely unpaid editor (Matthew Maher) starts working on Jamie’s film and Josh comes across footage for it which contains evidence – in the form of a tub of Darby’s ice cream – that the meeting with Kent was staged. Josh pursues this and discovers that Kent is a friend not of Jamie’s but of Darby’s: Jamie contacted him a few weeks before the shoot to set things up. Josh describes his still-to-be-completed documentary in various ways (all of them vague). At one point, he says it’s a film ‘about making a film’. It’s a strong and apt irony of While We’re Young that Jamie’s disingenuous documentary can be justified in similar terms. To Josh’s horror, Leslie is able to exonerate what Jamie has done – as an illustration of the porosity of fact and fiction boundaries. I found it hard to be as accepting as Leslie or, eventually, Josh succeeds in being: I really enjoyed While We’re Young. and found it full of interest but the moral of its story is disappointing (perhaps because I’m not a parent). The mellowness of the finale feels willed by Noah Baumbach. I preferred the flailing, indomitable dissatisfaction of Roger Greenberg.
7 April 2015