Noah Baumbach has been on something of a roll lately, and I can't help but feel that it's tied to his lightening up. From his breakthough film The Squid and the Whale, through 2010's Greenberg, he was known for a dark, mean, somewhat menacing tone that ran through his films, infusing them with a sort of nasty, vicious, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-inspired dialogue, which often affords its own devious yet downtrodden pleasures. But then he met his current muse and girlfriend Greta Gerwig, with whom he co-wrote Frances Ha and the upcoming Mistress America, larks filled with a breezy, funny, almost screwball sensibility, and now he comes out with While We're Young, an obviously personal rumination on generational differences that has some of the funniest, laugh out loud scenes of the year in it.
His Greenberg star Ben Stiller is back starring as Josh, a fortysomething documentarian who made one film and then never quite lived up to his potential, obsessed with the process of getting it right and too distracted by the lethargy of life to really finish it, always suffering under the shadow of his father-in-law, Charles Grodin, a filmmaker from a 60's generation who takes smug pride in his films finding the real life truth in cinema. Josh and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) love each other but are in kind of a rut, struggling with the weight of unmet expectations, since Cornelia has suffered several miscarriages and the two have resigned themselves to a life without kids while having to watch their busy, middle-aged friends all coping with the new baby lifestyle. So when a mid-twentysomething couple suddenly comes into their lives via auditing one of Josh's film classes at his university, their energy, vitality and fresh perspective rejuvenates Josh and Cornelia's desire to live in the moment, instead of dwelling on their present circumstances.
