Free Download While We're Young
A middle-aged couple's career and marriage are overturned when a disarming young couple enters their lives.
Director:
Noah BaumbachWriter:
Noah BaumbachStars:
Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam DriverFull Storyline
A middle-aged couple's career and marriage are overturned when a disarming young couple enters their lives.
And on paper that sounds really cool. The casting is also great, at least on paper. Plus, as we all know, Woody Allen has shown that these sorts of films can find an audience, and make money.
So on paper this was pure magic.
In real life? Not so much.
1. First, let's stop giving Woody Allen credit for inventing these sorts of films. He actually revived what used to a form of stage play called "comedies of Manners" and more or less built a second (spectacular) a career on that. This is a comedy of Manners. No more and no less.
2. Naomi Watts is solid, as is Seyfried. Ben Stiller, one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, seems a little lost here, as though he can't quite find the right note for his character. Plus -- the casting director should have noticed -- he has a prematurely aged face, that is, he always looks older than he is. That does not help his character, or the audience, at all.
3.The pacing is not merely bad, it is terrible. The dialog and story in this specific comedy of Manners are not sharp enough to carry the viewer through the slow bits. Plus, it does not help that Stiller's character, who plays a "failed film-maker," loves to rhapsodize about how "boring films eventually get interesting." If that was an inside joke, it is in bad taste.
4. The only "fun" bit in the entire film? At the 1:00 minute mark precisely, Naomi Watts mimics her Russian character from Saint Vincent. I smiled. That was the only smile the movie offered.
5. In the opinion of this reviewer, the entire overlong and convoluted sub-arc about the nature of film and documentaries (what is real, what is staged? etc) must have seemed clever during the first draft, sort of a Joss Whedonesque deconstruction of the medium (like Cabin in the Woods) but, as the film plays, it simply drags down deeper a story which is already drowning in its own self-awareness and navel-gazing.