How does one come to terms with age and its concomitant effects on the body? Science journalism tells us that yoga, strict diet and rigorous regimen of exercise will keep our telomeres, the region at the ends of our chromosomes, from not getting too short and thus help keeping us look young. But getting old is also about gaining experience while losing our innocence in the process. That's what makes the older couple in Noah Baumbach's new film While We're Young embrace the vitality of the younger couple they stumble across.
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as Josh and Cornelia are a 40-something couple yet to come to terms with the concept of mortality and the whole process of having and raising kids. At a moment when everyone around them is reproducing rapidly, they find a new lease of life in the hipster couple in their 20s played with delicious scene stealing ability by Adam Driver (Jamie) and Amanda Seyfried (Darby). For those not familiar with Baumbach's oeuvre, here's a one-line pitch about him: He's the Woody Allen for those who hate Woody Allen.
Baumbach's movies start out as Woody Allen homage pieces and end up completely mangling the bespectacled genius' moviemaking ethos. His characters never utter laugh-out loud dialogues, irony is their way of life, the audience will only titter in the cinema but, let there be no doubt, here's a man who has his ear firmly stuck to the ground. Here's an example on how Baumbach always contrives to pierce your heart with the fallibility of human beings. After a bad Ayahuasca trip, Stiller gets all ponderous and with his head firmly planted on Adam Driver's lap, he says that age has only made him "wistful and disdainful".
Baumbach is constantly derided as someone who doesn't look beyond New York City, more specifically Brooklyn. His audience base looks like privileged white people who sip martinis in the middle of the afternoon and pore over long-form pieces in The New Yorker while doing "creative" jobs in Manhattan. Even in While We're Young, Stiller's character is one such prototype, a documentary film-maker who has been forever making a documentary about a leftist intellectual. Adam Driver wants to follow his footsteps and become one as well. That may come across as tone-deafness but it looks like people are missing the point: He both mocks and respects the ethos of his supposed viewer demographics.
In the recent past, there have been movies from the United States that are about a forty-ish couple trying to imagine what their lives would have been if they could relive their twenties. Judd Apatow's This is Forty and, more recently, Seth Rogen-starrer Bad Neighbours did channel this trope to a certain extent before they fell apart. Baumbach's movie, however, has the necessary je ne sais quoi to keep it going right till the end. In a poignant scene in the latter half of the movie, Josh visits his friend who just had a newborn and asks him if he's feeling any different now that he's a father. He says that as much as the baby is important, his life comes first, which he doesn't intend to sacrifice at the altar of good parental karma.
Another scene that had the Baumbach touch was the climactic scene where Cornelia tells Josh that he hasn't been conned by Jamie who faked his way through a documentary and made Josh an unwitting accomplice. "He's not evil, he's just young," says Naomi Watts like a typically worldly Baumbach character. Inspired casting has always been Baumbach's strength. Whatever made him think Ben "A Night in the Museum" Stiller could pull off a guy with arrested development in Greenberg, that was a masterstroke. Same with While We're Young. Stiller's droll demeanour is just perfect for the role of Josh. We need a Baumbach to tell us through the Ben Stiller character that we are indeed the sum of our experiences and also the sum of our missed experiences.
PS: I never thought I'll get to see a Noah Baumbach movie on a big screen in India. A special shout out to PVR for championing all kinds of indie cinema.
