While We're Young * * *

This film struck me as a dumb film made smart. The story could be ideal popcorn and multiplex stuff. Laugh for a couple of hours then forget about it: You know how it goes: middle age couple start hanging out with young couple: loud music, physical activities that hurt, drugs that mess with your head.  Mixing the square oldies in with the hip youngsters is a well used comic scenario.

But actually While We’re Young  it isn't like that. Oh it plays it for laughs, but it doesn't just go for the easy stuff, and it gives you quite a bit to think about.  At the end I really wasn't sure if the film was putting down "Gen-Y" or just simply pointing out that, like previous generations, they are coming from a place that older generations don’t understand.  (When appropriation is considered just as meritorious  as creation I’m not sure if I understand them either).

Ben Stiller plays Josh, a freelance documentary maker who is taking years and years to make a film.  The father of his wife (Naomi Watts)  is an established documentary film maker and has an amusingly condescending attitude to Josh. To make things worse she works for her father.  Then Josh meet the hip and young Jamie and Darby.  Josh and his wife soon get involved with them.  But why does Jamie want to be Josh’s friend so much?  Flattery will get you a long way, much further than the flattered one realises, especially when you want to open a few doors to further your own career.  It’s a film of complicated self realisations rather than simple ones, which didn’t surprise me as the director/writer was also responsible for the coming of age drama The Squid and The Whale which, like, While We’re Young, was a mainstream film for the thinking person. A bit like Woody Allen does I guess.  It’s on at both Arthouse and Mainstream Cinemas for whichever way you’d prefer to watch it.