![]() But Baumbach attempts to go a little deeper, to delve also into matters of truth, identity, and the problem of the Real Thing. And the film is intensely enjoyable on that level. There’s a certain breezy obviousness to much of the humor: it’s like a broad, sitcom expansion of a Moral Tale or a Comedies and Proverbs episode that Baumbach’s beloved Eric Rohmer might have made on a sortie to Williamsburg. Their old friends aren’t impressed by their skin-deep attempts to be young, not even by the hat: “You’re an old man with a hat,” the Horovitz character tells Josh. Meanwhile, the couple have been neglecting their old friends, recent parents (Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz)-then go to their apartment to find them throwing a party, to which Josh and Cornelia aren’t invited. What are you seeing?” Cornelia: “I’m in a deli in Bensonhurst”), and guess what, someone kisses the wrong person. Some participants, but not all, get mystical insights (Josh: “It’s true, you see Egyptian shit. Josh and Cornelia accompany their new friends to an ayahuasca retreat, gagging on the mystic decoction to the sounds of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score. But then she’s giving it a go and moving those creaky joints-which is better than staying glued to her iPad, right?īaumbach works some of the ironies more elegantly than others. Cornelia joins Darby at one of her hip-hop dance sessions, and is angular, clumsy, and out-of-step. He also starts riding a bike, only to be told by his doctor that he has arthritis (“ Arthritis arthritis?” he gapes in disbelief). Josh buys his instant ticket to rejuvenation-a hat. The film’s prime joke is that what can make the young so appealing and inspiring to be around tends to look charmless and awkward in older people: when Josh and Cornelia start doing, you know, young stuff, they inevitably look absurd. Josh is so impressed, and rejuvenated, that he fails to notice that he always picks up the bill at his coffee sessions with Jamie-an enthuser but also possibly a user. The two couples start hanging out, and Josh and Cornelia find themselves gawping in astonished delight at the younger duo’s vivacity, creativity, their unceasing inexhaustible on-ness. Then Josh meets Jamie and Darby, who are attending one of his lectures Jamie tickles Josh’s vanity by complimenting one of his early films. Stiller’s Josh is a filmmaker teaching documentary while struggling to complete his own long-gestating project, an all-encompassing study of who knows what, exactly-no less than the entire contemporary global malaise, it appears-and in particular recording at length the cogitations of a guru-like penseur, one Ira Mandelshtam (echoes here of Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which Woody Allen’s character is similarly filming another venerable repository of ethical wisdom). This may not be the most original of social comedies, but it has a distinctive and enjoyable tang-I’m in no way belittling it if I call it a tart sorbet of a movie. While We’re Young offers plenty of caustic insights into contemporary bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle, plus a great deal of more ambitious philosophical inquiry, and for the most part- for the most part-Baumbach pulls it all off with lightness, delicacy, and that rare quality, joy. But this is probably unfair to Baumbach, a much wittier, more graceful filmmaker than Reitman. It’s a nice point, concisely made, but it worried me that Baumbach was overplaying his “How We Live Today” card-possibly because I’m still getting over the overzealous “alarm call” literalness of Jason Reitman’s indigestible Men, Women, & Children. Whereas it’s the older, hidebound couple who live in the world of present-day connectivity: we see them at home checking their mobiles, watching TV online, reading Kindles. The latter cultivate-or seem just organically, with innate coolness, to have-a connection with the past and with archaic forms like VHS tapes, board games, vinyl LPs. It’s one of the film’s many juxtapositions of the lifestyle of Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who are in their mid-to-late forties, settled and somewhat jaded, and that of indefatigably enthusiastic, creative young hipsters Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). First you think, “Neat cultural apercu,” then you worry that perhaps Baumbach hit the Zeitgeist Analysis button a little too neatly on cue. There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young that makes you do a double take.
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