The Kids Are Not All Right: A Millennial Perspective on ‘While We’re Young’
Written for Kenneth Turan’s “Writing the Film Review” class at USC.
By Christina Campodonico
“How are we going to get old?” asks Amanda Seyfried, playing an earnest twenty-five year old in “While We’re Young.”
It’s the same question facing Darby’s newfound friends, fortysomething, Gen X New Yorkers, Josh and Cornelia. It’s also the crux of Noah Baumbach’s latest indie investigation into aging and growing up. Though filled with promise, “While We’re Young” falters in its portrayal of millennials, precisely because Baumbach has an old way of seeing youth.
While Josh and Cornelia’s peers are off having babies, this couple’s marriage is stuck somewhere between comfortable and complacent. Josh (Ben Stiller), a once promising documentary filmmaker, is taking his sweet time finishing his next project, ten years in the making. He’s “waiting for more grant money to come in,” while he teaches continuing-education classes at the local community college. His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) has built a good career producing films for her father, the esteemed documentarian Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), but several miscarriages have made motherhood impossible.
When we meet the couple, who’ve just visited their friends’ newborn, they seem happy with their childless marriage. But they can’t quite savor the “freedom” that comes with it. While they kid about being able to take off for Paris whenever they want, they still haggle about the arrangements they would have to make at least a month in advance. The conversation hints that not all is quite right in DINK-Y (double-income-no-kids) paradise. When you’re forty-ish, mildly successful, married and haven’t had kids, where do you go from here?
Enter Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a twentysomething, hipster couple, who appear in Josh and Cornelia’s life, like bohemian fairy god mothers, injecting some youthful whimsy and much-needed novelty into the older couple’s stagnating marriage. Jamie and Darby show them what the kids do nowadays, inviting them to a shaman’s mystical ayahuasca ceremony and a “street beach,” where party-goers suntan in the road and suck on Jolly Rancher infused vodka.
As if seeing the world through new eyes, Josh and Cornelia become enamored by Jamie and Darby’s twee charms and analog living. Josh is amused by their constant “making of things,” like artisanal ice cream and Go-Pro home videos. Cornelia is invigorated by their constant energy and zest for life.
The honeymoon period fades when the couples’ intergenerational relationship seems to become more about making connections and less about actual friendship.
While the dynamic between these two couples is refreshing, wonderfully unexpected and mostly delightful, Baumbach’s doesn’t get the younger half of this odd couple quite right. Driver and Seyfried play their parts well, but Jamie and Darby feel like a dated impression of themselves. Their tastes, interests and living arrangements are more 35 than 25, more yuppy, “fauxhemian,” than struggling millennial.
They live in a converted industrial loft, probably in the next Williamsburg. It’s packed with far more vinyl records and retro ephemera — a typewriter, a Mad-Men era desk lamp and golden era movie posters — than could be possibly accumulated by one’s quarter century.
Such accoutrements feel inauthentic. Most twentysomethings I know are not living in the next “up-and-coming,” yet-to-be-gentrified part of town in apartments, furnished with vintage reproductions from Urban Outfitters. We’ll be lucky if that ubiquitous IKEA coffee table makes it back with us when we move back into our parent’s basements after graduation or another lay off. (Though I suppose we could always buy another one.)
After watching Jamie and Darby cavort in their shabby chic surroundings, youth in the big city appears more like a fantasy, than a rough coming-of-age. Jamie and Darby aren’t the twentysomethings, who graduated from high school or college into the Great Recession. Miraculously they’ve managed to carry on with their boho lifestyle unscathed and with a lot more stuff. Youth, in this case, is in the eye of the beholder, writer-director Noah Baumbach.
“I was sort of interested in that idea of how the culture of your youth sort of replays itself when you’re an adult,” said Baumbach in an interview with Hey U Guys.
That cultural rewind appears in Jamie and Darby. They are figures painted with a forty-five year old’s nostalgic eye for years gone by. The film looks with an almost rosy gaze back at the way youth was, circa 1990 — carefree, counter-culture, independent — rather than how it exists now in 2015 — saddled with debt, conformist, and crowded with way too many helicopter parents.
Cornelia muses to Josh that she wishes he would look at her the way that he looks at Jamie and Darby. I almost wish that Baumbach wouldn’t.
But perhaps we can forgive Baumbach’s naïve look at youth. Cornelia’s attitude toward Jamie is ultimately tempered — gentler and more apt:
“He’s not evil; he’s just young.”
Though Baumbach doesn’t get millennials down pat, “While We’re Young,” is a promising attempt at sketching out youth in the 21st century and figuring out what it all really means in relation to other generations. In this way, “While We’re Young” operates like the protagonist in a good bildungsroman — it falters; it fumbles; it makes mistakes. Yet it also seems to actively learn from those inevitable foibles of growing up, combining Gen X’s free form blasé with Gen Y’s unwieldy optimism to reach a new level of enlightenment.
