Review: While We're Young

Noah Baumbach's new film is funny, honest and a total curmudgeon. While We're Young meditates on aging from the viewpoint of Mr. Wilson from Denis the Menace. The film is a well acted, funny, easy moving picture but once you take a moment to reflect on it, While We're Young tends to feel rather grumpy.

Starring Ben Stiller, in a wonderful performance that reminds us how funny he can be, the film follows a 40-something couple caught between feeling the need to grow up and have a baby and the desires to remain relevant. This is where the slightly sour tone of the film begins. Baumbach and company believe on the young can be hip, edgy and cool and this viewpoint stifles the film. How refreshing would it be if a film treated its aging characters as knowledgeable, cool, in-the-know people.

Naomi Watts plays Stiller's wife and provides the only performance that doesn't feel overly heightened. Her character is actually facing the hard questions of hitting your 40's and having to decide if you ever want a child. When Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried enter the picture as a hipster couple, the film diverts from this story and focuses on their desire to be young again. Soon they are walking subway tracks in the middle of the night and remembering how cool vinyl is but there is more going on. The young couple may have alternative motives that get explored through a plotline that feels a little bit tacked on.

Baumbach is a talented writer and much of the dialogue is witty and insightful. However the whole thing feels forced into a viewpoint that not everyone will jive with. It's like a person who looks at the ocean and only sees all the ways it could kill him. While We're Young is a good film but it often feels like it could have been great.

3.5/5