10s Movie Review - While We're Young

Director: Noah Baumbach
Genre: Comedy/ Drama
Runtime: 97 minutes
Year: 2014
Starring: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin

I WATCHED THIS MOVIE FOR MY 2025 MOVIE CHALLENGE.
WEEK 23: A FILM WITH AMANDA SEYFRIED
 
Description: A middle-aged couple’s (Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller) career and marriage are overturned when a disarming young couple (Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried) enters their lives.

Review: Growing older is not easy, especially in a society as youth-oriented as ours. Becoming an adult is even more difficult these days, and increasingly less the same as growing older. What does it mean to be an adult, if it is no longer strictly tied to age? How do you become an adult and stay young at the same time? These questions are the basis of “While We’re Young”, by director Noah Baumbach.

Josh and Cornelia are a couple in their forties who are torn between what is expected of them at their age and their longing for their younger selves. The lives of their best friends revolve solely around children and parenthood, but the couple is not (yet) interested in that. Josh is a documentary filmmaker who has been working on his second film for ten years, without success. In doing so, he is actually postponing further development in his life, always citing the completion of his film as a reason for not doing anything else.

Then they meet Jamie and Darby, two incredibly hip twenty-somethings. They come acress as so original and spontaneous to Josh that he tries to become young again through his interactions with them and drags Cornelia along with him. This results in some funny scenes, where for example Cornelia is learning to dance to hip-hop after fleeing her best friend’s baby music class.

Baumbach skillfully interweaves artistic doubts with uncertainty about growing older and/ or becoming an adult, and the question of how to deal with this (and how not to). Baumbach has his own unique style, I always love his tragicomedies. And I feel like this is a movie that is overlooked by many.

Rating: 4 / 5