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Sunday, April 12, 2015

While We're Young (2015)

A childless documentary film maker (Ben Stiller) and his wife (Naomi Watts) find themselves in their early 40s and distanced from the lifestyle of their friends with children. When they meet a hip young couple (Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried), they're refreshed and attempt to enter their world. But the generation gap is too wide to be bridged successfully. I like what I've seen from Noah Baumbach (his MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is one of the most underrated films of the 2000s) and while WHILE WE'RE YOUNG may be his most commercial film to date, it still has his razor sharp eye on the follies of contemporary living. On the surface, it may appear that Baumbach is siding with the over 40s but he's just as hard on Stiller's documentarian  as he is on Driver's ambitious film maker. The humor in the film has the sting of recognition so that your laugh gets caught in your throat. I can see how someone can see the film as the rant of an "old" man (Baumbach is 44) but that's hardly the case. The flaws of one generation are no greater than the flaws of another, the aim is to go past those stereotypes. Baumbach also takes a perceptive cut toward contemporary documentary film making. While the women don't fare as well as the males, Watts and Seyfried are good enough actresses to flesh out their characters. With Charles Grodin, Adam Horowitz and Maria Dizzia.

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