Director: Noah Baumbach
Screenplay: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin, Adam Horovitz
Running Time: 97 minutes
Genre: Comedy, drama
New York City: Josh Schrebnik (Stiller) is 44 year old documentary filmmaker and teacher. After making a splash with his debut film, he has spent ten years working on his follow-up, and is married to Cornelia (Watts). One night Josh meets 25 year old aspiring filmmaker Jamie Massey (Driver) and his wife Darby (Seyfried). Josh is enamored with the free-spirited hipster couple, Cornelia is more reluctant, but still finds herself drawn to Jamie and Darby. Before long the older couple are adopting the tastes and lifestyles of their younger friends, at the expense of their older friends. But things go wrong, when Josh realises that Jamie's values and worldview don't match up with his own.
This is an enjoyable and consistently funny film which does make some pertinent points about ageing. Josh and Cornelia are approaching their mid-forties and so are a long way from being elderly (full disclosure I am currently 41) but they are facing the specter of old age there are things that they want to do in their lives that they realise they have to do sooner rather than later, or risk never being able to do them at all. Also they are stuck in a rut, Josh has been working in the same film for ten years, and still doesn't know what it's about. Both he and Cornelia feel alienated from their best friends, who are new parents. They are drawn to Jamie and Darby because of their creativity, energy, and their enthusiasm particularly for retro pop culture. However, Josh soon comes to realise that Jamie is full of pretence and artifice, and is also very manipulative. However the film makes it clear that Jamie and Darby are part of a changing world, and Josh and Cornelia are not condemned or really mocked for embracing a youthful lifestyle, in fact it proves a mostly positive experience. Ben Stiller is funny and engaging in the lead, and Adam Driver gets a lot of mileage form his cool hipster persona. Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried are largely sidelined though. Noah Baumbach has usurped Woody Allen as the king of New York comedy-dramas, mixing heart and humour in nearly equal doses. This isn't his best work but it is still worth checking out.
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