While We’re Young **** (2014, Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin) – Movie Review

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as a middle-aged couple whose career and marriage are renewed when disarming young couple Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried enters and energises their lives.

Writer/director Noah Baumbach‘s comedy is smart, witty and perceptive. As with his 2010 success Greenberg, it offers a real chance for Stiller to shine in something more thoughtful and more indie than usual. All the performers are good though, with Watts and Stiller working overtime to please, both of them at their terrific best.

Greenberg’s initially charismatic but ultimately chilly character gives him a lot of good stuff to perform, which he grabs by the scruff of the neck. And there’s plenty of room for old Charles Grodin to score too as celebrated documentary movie-maker Dad, who looks down on Stiller, another documentary-maker, but one who’s been working on the same flop film for years.

A Woody Allen-style film about the traps and perils of middle age, it doesn’t have anything much that’s very profound to say but it says it stylishly and amusingly. Not sure about the ending, but otherwise this is a little winner.

Now middle-aged himself, Baumbach made his first film Kicking and Screaming (1995) when he was 26 years old, then came The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Frances Ha (2012).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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