While We're Young (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                     1 hr & 37 min, color, 2015

                            

Anyone who views a sizable amount of cinema has surely encountered instances in which the film’s basic point or basic area of inquiry is not immediately apparent.  You are many minutes, maybe many scenes or sequences, into the action before it all starts to come together.  You feel as if you are being played with, until the spade at last strikes the mother lode. "Oh, I see where this is going!"  An AHA moment, which assures your fixed attention from that point to final fade-out!  Such was the case for me when I began following, or trying to follow, the plot line of "While We're Young", a quirky comedy of seeming eccentricity and desultory happenstance.

                            

I knew at once that Josh (Ben Stiller) is a forty-ish documentary film maker who has been laboring for many years trying to finish a film and that his spirited wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is the film’s producer eager but not quite impatient for him to finish it.  They are childless seemingly by choice and are enjoying their sense of freedom from tie-down.  But then along comes Jamie (Adam Driver), another aspiring film maker, and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried).  They are a twosome in their twenties, who scoop the older couple up into their rather wild and wistful circle of young acquaintances and spin them around until they lose focus on what they are all about.  I thought I myself might be losing focus on what I was supposed to be gleaning from the several odd encounters into which they are led.  The oddest is a visit with their new friends to a shaman who urges his devotees to drink a weird hallucinatory concoction that makes them barf into a bowl, allegedly barfing up all that poisons their minds and hearts.  The scene is reminiscent of the LSD trips that were so prevalent in the sixties.  They learn some new and out of character habits, like bike riding in Manhattan and hip hop dancing.  In short, the new couple sweeps them off their feet.

                            

But it was not long before I rediscovered something I feel I should have remembered right off the bat – that people are not always what they appear to be, ethically or morally, not even to themselves.   I also came to realize that this movie was dealing in a subject of the greatest interest to me – the creative process, and not only the process but the place of honesty and integrity that the process requires. 

                            

The screenplay by writer/director Noah Baumbach turns out to be something quite special.  The man knows from the beginning what he is doing; what looks at first like an incoherent circus of developments is the work of a coherent vision that pays great dividends, after all gauze has been stripped away.   What it all reveals, without toning down the deadpan, flippant, nervy humor that pervades almost every scene and confrontation, is worth the price of admission.  Some hollering gets done, but it turns out to be a bitter/sweet salute to loving hearts and self-reflective and self-respecting minds. 

                            

I may be scaring some of you away to report that the F word is rampant, but this time I did not mind it so much.  The way it is used in most instances makes it sound like a parody of itself, which in fact it has become from overuse.   

                            

You may have noticed that I am not disclosing plot details.  I wanted to steer clear this time around from issuing any spoiler alerts.  There are surprises and complications that are quite ingenious.  They all revolve around the question of who is playing whom. 

                            

I will point out that there is one character who serves a vital supporting role in the picture – Cornelia’s father (veteran actor Charles Grodin), an accomplished movie creator himself, who has influenced his daughter all through her four decades and has tried to be supportive of his once promising son-in-law.  It is a life achievement dinner in the elderly man’s honor that brings the competitive minds together and caps things off.  A quite revealing moment of truth to be savored! 

                            

There are timeless questions that the film plays with:  What is truth?  Where do we draw the line between it and fact?  To whose truth must documentary film makers be subject?  How much objectivity do we have a right to expect of them?  Must all artists be subversive in the pursuit of their craft?  Does creativity require a certain amount of selfishness in its pursuit?  How purist does one have the right to be in the enforcement of critical standards?  Where does ownership enter the picture?  What part does age play in the seasoning of creative talent?  These questions are not given academic treatment; they brush by us in the rich flow of comic repartee.

                            

This is my first chance to scrutinize the gifted talent of Ben Stiller up close.  He has surely come a long way from Saturday Night Live and other TV comic work of a generation ago.  His portrayal of Josh is seemingly flawless; his timing is superb. His character takes a well deserved place in the Woody Allen tradition as a somewhat uncoordinated little guy aiming either too high or too low.  Especially does this come out in two scenes wherein Josh tries to explain, first to a hedge fund donor and second to his father-in-law, what his unfinished magnum opus is about – two of the funniest monologues I have lately seen and listened to.  They are a scream! 

                            

And until now I have been just as unfamiliar with the work of Naomi Watts, though she has appeared in a vast assortment of films.  Her filmography indicates that she is a steady worker, with something in release just about every year for the last ten to twenty.  She is a force to embrace and works most effectively with Stiller.  They are an outstanding team.  I hope that they both get some award recognition at year’s end.

                            

Baumbach is an independent movie maker who made his name with “The Squid and the Whale” (2005), a domestic drama that got rave attention at the Sundance Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for Original Screenplay.  He later drew praise and commercial success with “Frances Ha” (2012), about an aspiring young female dancer, which I may be reviewing soon on this blog.  He is certainly an auteur to be watched.  His knowledge of people is keen; his portrayal of human emotion strikes me as exceptional, and his gift for creating incisive dialogue as well.  And it all feels so spontaneous.  In “While We’re Young” he not only delves into the business of creativity, but does so most ingeniously and drives what he has to say homeward in what for me is an unforgettable last scene – perhaps the funniest scene in the whole show, a sight gag that I will never forget.  It left me reeling with laughter right into the closing credits.  A real corker!   I wish many of you the same pleasure from seeing this that I have derived.        

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.