Movie Review: While We’re Young

While We’re Young is the Antz to Bad Neighbours’ A Bug’s Life, and not just because Adam Driver looks like a giant grasshopper.

Noah Baumbach’s sympathies have shifted.

It used to be that the kids in his movies were captive victims of their selfish parents (see: The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding). Now, in the writer-director’s latest menopausal farce, the young are cannibalising the adults. Metaphorically, of course. Baumbach’s hasn’t changed so much that you’d suddenly mistake his low-key dramedies with The Walking Dead.

In While We’re Young, Baumbach’s former Greenberg star Ben Stiller plays Josh, a once-promising documentarian whose career hasn’t quite panned out the way he’d imagined. His marriage to Cornelia (Naomi Watts) - like his latest, long-gestating doco - has also grown stagnant.

They’re temporarily revitalised by Jamie (Girls’ and soon Star Wars’ Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a couple of twenty-something hipster flibbertigibbets who intrude on their lives disguised as fans of Josh’s early work.

At first their friendship makes Josh and Cornelia feel youthful, as if by osmosis. (Invites to street parties, hip hop dance classes and hallucinogenic Ayahuasca ceremonies help in the rejuvenation too.) They even ditch their normcore, age-appropriate pals, played by Maria Dizzia and honest-to-goodness Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, transformed via salt-and-pepper stubble and baby sling.

But, eventually, they see through their ironic façade and realise Jamie, in particular, is merely an ambitious young director only interested in sucking Josh’s life-force (or, to describe it from a more reasonable perspective, stealing his industry connections). Now, what was once cute about the vibrant young marrieds only inspires fury and frustration, from the way they watch bad ‘80s movies on VHS, to Darby’s side-business churning artisanal ice-cream, not to mention their most egregious sin of all: having their whole lives ahead of them.

All of this may remind you of 2014’s Bad Neighbours, an ingenious coming-of-age comedy that pit Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne’s uneasy-with-responsibility adults against fun-loving frat boys. The Woody Allen-esque While We’re Young instead focuses on a battle between the New York intelligentsia and Brooklyn faux-bohos. It’s not nearly as funny, which isn’t entirely surprising. However, it’s also less insightful, and that is certainly unexpected. How can the goofy Seth Rogen vehicle have more pathos?

In the final act, While We’re Young takes aim at Jamie for being an inauthentic filmmaker, forgetting that, for a while, the feature was actually about two adults re-coming of age. Well, one adult, anyway. Ben Stiller shines with his slow-burn breakdown, but Naomi Watts has little to do except fret over her friends’ new lives as mothers. (Bad Neighbours gave "mama bear" Rose Byrne way more to chew on.)

Baumbach’s last project, Frances Ha, was a wildly empathetic picture about a perpetual (yet lovable) screw-up in her twenties. That one was co-written by its lead actress, Greta Gerwig. You can see what she brought by identifying what’s missing in While We’re Young, which treats its younger characters as if they were extra-terrestrial pod people. That’s all well and good for something more outwardly satirical (maybe like Woody’s "early, funny ones"). Here though, the cynicism is unfeeling. Even Bad Neighbours gave a genetically-engineered ab-robot like Zac Efron an arc.

Perhaps turning 45 has altered Noah Baumbach's perspective, but it certainly hasn't softened his prickly spirit. Now, he's the one calling from the patio for the kids to get off his property. I guess I just prefered it when he was on the other side of the fence. Hell, he'd probably say the same.

3/5

While We're Young arrives in cinemas April 16. Rated M for coarse language.