Their interaction gets quirky. At one point, the two couples attend a purification ceremony in an apartment where everyone vomits after taking ipecac.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
"While We're Young": comedy by Noah Baumbach creates conflict over the ethics inside documentary filmmaking
“While We’re Young”, by Noah Baumbach is about filmmaking,
ethics, truth, marriage, and morality, all in a 97-minute little New York
comedy.
Josh (Ben Stiller), married to Cornelia (Naomi Watts) and
still childless in middle age, teaches film and is trying to finish a 6-hour
documentary about political power. He
has trouble telling people what it’s about, especially Cornelia’s dad, also a
director Ira (Peter Yarrow). One day
they meet a couple a generation younger, Jamie (Adam Driver), also a
documentary filmmaker, married to Darby (Amanda Seyfried).
Josh has told the class that documentary is about other
people, while fiction is about the self.
He says that non-diction documentary should be about the self, too.
Jamie is quite flashing, warm, non-judgmental, and willing
to look as free as necessary with the body art (temporary) on his
forearms. His documentary has to do with
a soldier Kent (Brady Corbet) returned from Afghanistan. He has a bizarre idea for how to pick subject
other than himself, depending on real-world responses from old friends from
surprise Facebook contacts. In my own
life, there are people who prefer everything be real world (no social
media). That idea creeps into the
script.
Their interaction gets quirky. At one point, the two couples attend a purification ceremony in an apartment where everyone vomits after taking ipecac.
Their interaction gets quirky. At one point, the two couples attend a purification ceremony in an apartment where everyone vomits after taking ipecac.
Toward the end, there’s an ethical battle, as Jamie
“falsifies” his own part of the story, setting up a confrontation at the climax
of the film. Finally, the issue of having children, and adoption, even from troubled areas of the world, surfaces. Do younger adults have a looser moral compass, depending on the idea of over-sharing and that "everything belongs to everyone?" That does, for example, bear on copyright and piracy issues in film and music. (At tone point, there was a quote of the infamous Karl Marx quote about abilities and needs, that got banded about in parody in the barracks in my own Army days.) Is any journalistic license allowed in reporting? That sounds like the problems with Brian Williams, former and now defrocked anchor at NBC for "exaggerating" (although Williams isn't so young). Journalistic objectivity is another good issue, in a society that sometimes needs people to take sides.
The film uses a lot of Vivaldi, and some pop songs. At one point, Josh seems to be singing to
himself “I want to do it” in a theme that resembles the “I want to do you” from
Modern Family (not credited).
I saw the film at the AMC Shirlington in Arlington before a
small late Saturday audience. Picture is mine, NYC, 5th Ave., Oct. 2014.
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