MovieChat Forums > While We're Young (2015) Discussion > Not too bad for cliche-ridden silliness

Not too bad for cliche-ridden silliness


If I'm disappointed in While We're Young the I have no one to blame but myself. I knew that it is a creation of the insipid Noah Baumbach and I knew that the cast includes Ben Stiller and Amanda Seyfried. I watched it anyway.

First, the film is being marketed as a comedy. It is not a comedy.

The story, which is not too bad, suffers from the (seemingly) eternal trek that the older couple lets the younger one take them on before delivering anything resembling drama. All of the mismatched generation cliches are there along with all of the revealed couple dynamics, including the utterly predictable "fooling around" scenes.

The sequences involving the hallucinogenic drugs were the worst; they felt especially forced.

The biggest problem with While We're Young is in its casting. While Stiller can still do comedy, he is and never has been capable of delivering a believable, sympathetic dramatic performance (as he demonstrated in the forgettable Greenberg). Seyfried is very pretty but as wooden as always.

The only things making this film watchable are the performances of Watts and Driver and a generally good supporting cast (although Grodin looks like he's about to fall asleep in an underwritten role). The subplot involving children was also well done.

Can't say I didn't warn myself.

If you're a star-review person, I give While We're Young 2 1/2.

jj

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jesusofjonesboro writes: "Seyfried is very pretty but as wooden as always."

I found her teary eyes in the bar scene very authentic!

What I did find cliché was the notion that if your career is on the rocks, it is because you don't have a child.

I think the main problem with Stiller was the material. [spoiler]accepting that you are an "old man" is boring![spoiler] The writer/director is at fault here, for seemingly saying that is life -- it may be, but it's rather a boring conclusion.


 "Maybe it's another dimension. Or, you know, just really deep." --Needy

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The ayahuasca scene was the best part.

Text is cheap.

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Well, I think Baumbach is brilliant. You may have forgotten Greenberg, but that's demonstrably you and not the movie, because I think it's a masterpiece and I sure as hell remember it from beginning to end. (It's one of my 60 favorite films of all time ... and my review here, which you might check out if you want to understand what I see in it, is the most helpful.)

One thing that I've learned from reactions to Baumbach's films is that they don't work at all for people who believe "likeable" and "sympathetic" are the same thing. In fact, I've liked his movies in inverse order of the likeability of his characters.

If you don't have an interest in the intensely sympathetic portrayal of (often quite) unlikeable characters -- if that seems like some kind of contradiction in terms to you -- then just move on. Your brain isn't wired for his films. But no filmmaker has ever tackled that slice of humanity better.

And it goes without saying that your reaction is just that. Films are ultimately judged on two axes: the strength of the response of those who like them, and their breadth of appeal, which is to say the proportion of people that can relate to them. It would be a dull film world indeed if every filmmaker wanted to speak to a broad audience. For someone like Baumbach who has a very strong appeal to a relatively narrow audience (which, understand, I do not think is generational or attitudinal, but defined by an interest in moral complexity and some kind of extra capacity for empathy), the opinions of folks who aren't wired to get him is pretty much irrelevant.


Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

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You summed it up very well - not too bad for a cliche ridden sillines. I enjoyed a bit in fact, it was somewhat amusing and i dont regret i watched it.

my vote history:
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur13767631/ratings

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