I must concede that my love for Noah Baumbach’s cinema is at least partly founded on the belief that he’s writing for me, and a cultish minority of other mes out there, and not the mass populace that fills multiplexes for comic-book sequels and Kevin Hart buddy movies.
Like his antecedent Whit Stillman, his best films have talked up to their audience, not down. While the rest of his school of ’90s cinema dealt in forced quirk and Gen-X ennui — and the millennials in directionless mumblecore — Baumbach’s voice was brainy and sardonic, with a cultivated inside-baseball sense of humor. There was something to be said for the fact that your grandma and your boss and John Q. Public probably wouldn’t see the humor and character insight in Chris Eigeman’s berating of Eurotrash diction in Kicking and Screaming, or Jeff Daniels inflating his self-importance by name-dropping George Plimpton at a party in The Squid and the Whale, or Ben Stiller’s Greenberg handling Greta Gerwig’s John Mayer jewel case like it’s a toxic substance.
I’m sad to report that, like a politician softening his primary stances to win a general election, Baumbach’s latest feature, While We’re Young, seems decidedly calculated to win over a mass audience, at this expense of his cult. There are sunny montages to pop music. There is goofy dancing. There are caricatured people who exist onscreen solely for the purpose of easy, unearned laughs.
And, when a secret is revealed, there’s even one of those collages of moments edited together containing every visual and linguistic clue we missed that would have given the secret away, even though most of us are probably ahead of Baumbach on this one. This is the cinematic grammar of Tom Shadyac and Dennis Dugan, not one of the cinema’s most astute chroniclers of the tumultuous transition into middle age.
Which remains Baumbach’s subject this time around. Stiller and Noami Watts are Josh and Cornelia; she’s the daughter of a prominent ’60s documentary filmmaker, and he’s an adjunct professor and struggling documentarian himself, perpetually editing an pretentious, un-pitchable snoozer about The State of the World. Childless and routine, their marriage has lost its spark, but they find new inspiration in the form of Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried), a 20-something couple that has been auditing Josh’s cinema course.
Jamie is a charming hipster of the sort Josh has apparently never encountered: He dresses like a retired radical, watches VHS tapes, collects vinyl and ironically appreciates bad ’80s rock. And he’s also a documentary filmmaker, with a passion for silent Soviet cinema and for Josh’s limited oeuvre, and he’d love Josh’s participation in a new idea for a movie. Meanwhile, he and Darby being to invite their older new BFFs to hip-hop dance classes, subway tunnel strolls and ayahuasca ceremonies — reminders of a youth that Josh and Cornelia never appreciated when they had it, and which reignites their 40-something libidos.
There’s admittedly a lot to like here. The references to Pennebaker and Godard and hermeneutics are a tasty hook for Baumbach’s base, and his keen eye for relatable observations remains strong around the film’s periphery. “Why is it when one person around a table checks their phone, everybody else feels they have to?” goes one restaurant-table musing. Josh says he’s trying to kick his Internet connection, adding, “How many times can I check the Huffington Post?” One scene in particular, when Josh is diagnosed with an arthritic knee, is mercilessly funny.
And when it wants to, While We’re Young can present piercing perspective I’d never heard voiced before, in a film or in life — like when Josh’s friend Fletcher (the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz), who is raising a child with his wife, comments on the accepted theory that when you have a kid, it becomes the most important thing in more your life: “I love my baby, but I’m still the most important person in my life,” he says.
But this is not the core of While We’re Young. The more it progresses, the more it devolves into a geriatric harangue about truth versus falsity in filmmaking. Baumbach’s script becomes so bogged down in documentary ethics that it loses its original thread, and it even lifts a crucial plot point from the superior Broadcast News.
Stiller was a three-dimensional grouch in Greenberg; in While We’re Young, he sounds like a mouthpiece for a shrill side of Baumbach I didn’t know existed, one that seems intent on lecturing us about a topic — the manipulation of objective reality for entertainment purposes — that feels about 10 years behind the times.
Make that 100 years, even. Robert Flaherty manipulated his silent proto-documentary Nanook of the North. Just because Baumbach is smart enough to quote Nanook in an early scene of While We’re Young doesn’t make the movie’s arguments any less passé.
WHILE WE’RE YOUNG. Director: Noah Baumbach. Cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin, Adam Horovitz, Maria Dizzia; Distributor: A24; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters