Who hasn’t heard, or uttered, the threat: “Wait until you have kids of your own.”
The reasons for not having kids are as numerous as the peer and social pressure to have them is enormous.
Kids – having them and being them – are one of the subplots of “While We’re Young,” Noah Baumbach’s New York Centric comedy about the terrors of acting your age.
The truth is you are not as young as you feel; you are as old as you are. And each age brings with it unique pleasures and misery in equal measure.
Ben Stiller and that Naomi Watts play a somewhat happily married couple who take their childless freedom for granted. They can do anything and go anywhere they want, they just never do or go.
He’s a documentary filmmaker living off grants who has been working on the same film about an existentially dense philosopher (Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary) for almost a decade, and she is the daughter of a pioneer in the genre, played by Charles Grodin, who produces her father’s films.
Their lives change the day they meet the fountain of youth personified by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. They are carefree hipsters – with a wall full of vinyl LPs, movies on VHS and a pet chicken in a bird cage – whose lives and life style reminds the older couple of who they once were.
The trouble begins when they try to become whom they once were, again.
Instead of spending time with friends their own age, played by Adam Horowizt and Maria Dizzia, who just had a baby and from whom they’ve grown apart, they are going to block parties in Brooklyn and hip hop classes. The younger couple embraces ironically things the older couple regard nostalgically.
“I remember when that song was just bad,” says a puzzled Stiller.
That Driver’s character is also a documentary filmmaker – Stiller goes from being his mentor and collaborator to stepping stone – is more than a coincidence in a narrative that is really about the thin line between perception and reality; how life is captured and portrayed and how one chooses to live it.
The description above drains the playfulness out of a film that finds considerable humor is in its clash of generational extremes and values and the lengths the older couple go to become something they are not. In the end, life is revealed as the total of one’s own experiences, not those of someone else.
***1/2 Three and one half stars
With Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Horovitz, Maria Dizzia, Peter Yarrow, Charles Grodin. Produced by Noah Baumbach, Eli Bush, Scott Rudin, Lila Yacoub. Written and directed by Noah Baumbach. Rated R; language, adult theme. Approximate runnning time 97 minutes.
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