As I’ve told my sons, “If you can avoid it, don’t get old.” Obviously, this good advice is impossible to heed and while there’s that notion that with age comes wisdom, I’d gladly be a bit dumber if I could just keep my knees from aching and cracking each time I crouch down. No, what’s most frightening about getting older is how things gradually slip away from us – memory, ambition, opportunities – things we take for granted and only miss after it’s too late to take advantage of them.
All of this gradually dawns upon documentary filmmaker Josh (Ben Stiller) in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, an examination of one man’s loss of identity as it’s usurped by a younger, far more ambitious version of himself, as well as time itself. He’s a director with great ideas but little followthrough, paralyzed by doubt and indecision, working on the same documentary for over ten years with no end in sight. Hanging on by a thread financially, the father of his lovely understanding wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a groundbreaking documentarian whose reputation casts a long shadow that Josh can’t seem to escape. However, he starts to feel a bit of hope when he meets Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried), young marrieds who are auditing his continuing education class on filmmaking. They compliment him, ask him to dinner, fawn over his work and eventually ingratiate themselves into Josh and Cornelia’s life.
Very quickly, Josh and Cornelia are seduced by Jamie and Darby, abandoning their old friends in favor of attending street beach parties and hooky religious ceremonies as well as agreeing to help them with their own film. Along the way they attempt to recapture their youth by adapting the younger couple’s hipster lifestyle, a response on Josh’s part to symptoms he’s feeling that indicate his body is breaking down as well as the notion that through Jamie he might be able to be the filmmaker he never was. As for Cornelia, she finds refuge from the fact that she cannot have a child in taking up hip-hop dancing and socializing with Darby far too much.
Josh’s loss of identity is evident not only when he realizes that Jamie is intent on taking his place but when he comes to the conclusion that time has rendered his ethics and work obsolete. It comes as a genuine surprise to him that his resistance (inability?) to change and find an unique voice of his own has led to him being left behind by all who surround him and that in some sense he’s been holding Cornelia back as well. His sense of integrity and hesitance to complete his documentary has just been an excuse to ignore the fact that filmmaking may not be his calling. Denial and fear have ruled him and coming to terms with these facts have been too much to bear. Jamie is his id, manipulating facts in his films to fit his vision of the “truth,” compromising himself at every turn in his pursuit of success. When Josh finally sees the young man for who is – for who he would have to be in order to succeed – this cuts him to the core.
Pitch perfect performances from the cast, which includes Charles Grodin as Cornelia’s father, a brisk pace and containing humor and pathos that genuinely develops over the course of the film, Young is a thought-provoking look not only at the difficulty of aging but coming to terms with the mistakes of your past. While it’s been said that age is simply a state mind, there’s no denying that we only get so many opportunities to transform ourselves and in letting too many of these pass, we run the risk of growing old before our time.
Contact Chuck Koplinski at [email protected].
