“I’m losing my edge,” intones James Murphy in LCD Soundsystem’s 2002 breakout single. The stuttering bass line behind his voice provokes anxiety and defiance.
“I’m losing my edge / to better looking people / with better ideas / and more talent … / and who are actually really, really nice.” As the bass, drums and synth get louder, Murphy digs in his heels deeper, refusing to concede even an inch to those young folks who are quickly creeping up from behind.
But alongside that skepticism is another impulse, irrepressible, comforting, and dubious: even though I’m getting older, maybe I’m still one of the young.
While We’re Young, Noah Baumach’s new movie about a married couple in their 40s who are both revived and repulsed by a younger couple in their 20s, offers a film equivalent to Murphy’s dilemma. Both works are told from the perspective of middle-aged artists who feel acutely threatened, inspired, and disgusted by their nascent successors. They want to fit in with that younger cohort, but they also want to demonstrate their superiority, earned through hard-won experience and a sincere yearning for truth. Both Murphy’s and Baumbach’s characters wield ego, insecurity, and an abrasive anti-charm with such deftness that nearly every one of their works elicits an involuntary smile and wince.
The film opens on Cornelia (Naomi Watts) gazing lovingly at a newborn baby. She coos, smiles, and begins to whisper the story of the three little piggies … or is it Humpty Dumpty? Unable to remember exactly what happens before the big bad wolf starts to wreak havoc, she looks to her husband Josh (Ben Stiller) for support. Uncertainty leads to panic as the baby starts crying, only to be mollified by the arrival of the child’s actual parents. After returning home from their afternoon of failed babysitting, Josh and Cornelia fall into seemingly familiar banter about how great it is not to have kids.
As with many of Baumbach’s adult characters, from Jeff Daniels’s father in The Squid in the Whale to Ben Stiller’s repugnant, enthralling brother in Greenberg, Josh and Cornelia are helplessly self-involved. They are so confident in their own virtues and in the inveterate deficiencies of others that, even when they recognize that they are unhappy, they assume that someone else — anyone else — must be to blame.
From the very start of the film, Baumbach presents Josh and Cornelia as frightened of the future, frustrated with the past, and uncertain about the present. They think that getting married early was a sign of precocious, rebellious, maturity, while not having a child and working in creative professions will protect them against the creeping sacrifices of adulthood and the inevitable degradations of old age.
Of course, their marital history is more complicated than that. They tried to have children earlier in their marriage, but, after several miscarriages, convinced themselves not only that they could not have children, but also that they did not want children.
When they meet Jamie and Darby, a young, spontaneous, almost pathologically unencumbered couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, Josh and Cornelia are jolted from the daily monotony that has come to define their lives. Josh in particular concludes that he is not yet destined for old age, and throws himself headlong into the life of a twentysomething Brooklyn hipster.
But Josh and Cornelia do not just see Jamie and Darby as younger versions of themselves. Rather, the younger couple embodies a strangeness, vitality, and freedom that they associate with youth. Even if Josh and Cornelia never experienced those exact feelings in their own early adulthood, they certainly are aware of their absence in middle age.
But Baumbach’s films are rarely idealistic. Josh soon learns that Jamie and Darby have been dishonest with him, that they do not in fact represent everything generous and disarming and laudable about youth, and it throws him into another spiral of anger and fear.
Which gets to the very essence of the film itself. Bumbach presents a certain predictable continuity between generations. Arrogance, fear, jealousy, ambition, shame, and sometimes love seem to transcend differences in age. In fact, all that serves to distinguish between the young and not-so-young at the end of the film is that the latter can no longer cling to the delusion of immortality.
While We’re Young concludes with the reassurance that one does not have to feel intimidated by the next generation, for their only sin is being young. Their arrival does not have to signal a conquest or defeat, but just an addition to that big pot of selfish, flawed, pathetic, redeemable human beings. As Cornelia puts it halfway through the film, “The more, the more.” This isn’t exactly comforting, but then again, the people in the film aren’t looking to be comforting.
They’re just looking out for themselves.
