How many people have experienced this? You find yourself in your 30’s or 40’s and yet you still feel like you’re a kid…You wonder…When did I become so grown-up? And then you do your best to convince yourself, that you’re not ‘all that grown-up’… You can still do the same things, that you did when you were in your twenties…You’re still adventurous…spontaneous, and can take off anywhere at a moments notice..
That’s exactly what married couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are doing when we meet them. These Gen-Xers, are trying very hard to convince themselves and each other, that they’re still young…still ‘cool’. Of course it’s more than obvious that is so not the case.
Cornelia, who works for her father, (the wonderful, Charles Grodin) an award winning documentary filmmaker, hides her disappointment that despite numerous fertility treatments, she hasn’t been able to conceive a child. At the same time, neurotic, insecure,Josh, who has spent 10 years working on a documentary film that is still far from finished, pretends that he’s okay with that. What they don’t know, is that their desire to live their life before they reached middle-age, is about to come true.
As Josh winds up a class he’s teaching at New York City’s New School, he’s approached by Jamie (the excellent Adam Driver) an aspiring filmmaker.in his 20’s, who proceeds to gush all over him. Jamie tells him, that he loves the rarely seen documentary that Josh made years ago. The two go for coffee and after more flattery, Josh is completely won over by Jamie and decides that they’re gonna be BFF’s. He rushes home and tells Cornelia all about his new, super cool, admirer.
The next day, Jamie invites the couple over to his loft, where they meet his free-spirited, ice cream maker, girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried) and to Cornelia and Josh’s surprise, they discover that everything they threw away years ago…electric typewriters, VHS tapes, board games, and vinyl records, fills the young couple’s living space. Oh, and they also have a chicken.
Josh and Cornelia are convinced, this young couple with their hip, ‘live in the moment’ lifestyle, is the way back to their youth. They throw aside their long time friends, including Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, along with his wife and new mom (Maria Dizzia) and follow the plugged in hipsters all over the city, doing everything they do. One of the funniest scenes in the film, is Cornelia taking her first hip-hop class with Darby and at the same time, Josh is speeding along the streets of Brooklyn on his new bike with Jamie. On an aside, I wish Hollywood filmmakers would stop depicting their version of an Ayawaska ceremony. They always get it wrong and in this case, writer, director, Noah Bombach really got it wrong.
That said, ‘While We’re Young, is a funny, touching film about aging, ambition, success, marriage and what it takes to survive in a world, where thanks to technology, your life is constantly on display for everyone to see and exploit. The film which opens in theatres Friday, March 27, 2015, reminds me of a couple of Woody Allen’s classics. The cast, the dialogue, the story all work and for that reason I gave it four bagels out of five.
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