While We’re Young is a pleasant, easy movie, good for some relaxing and enjoyable laughs. Set as a movie regarding a couple in their early 40s at the crossroads of watching a carefree youth set sail over the horizon while they settle down into the stable, shored life they’ve built for themselves, the film rings a familiar tune with a lot of folks who’ve not followed the once more traditional college-marriage-kids route. But our couple’s crossroads is more so due to what life has handed them and their friends’ lives changing than a conscious decision to reflect on where they are.
Our lead couple, feeling left behind by their best friends’ changed life with their new baby, finds themselves suddenly befriended and hanging out with a much younger couple who bring a zest for life, irresponsibility, and quirkiness that we tend to let go of as we settle into our roles over the years. Sure, that newness is fun for a while, but can it sustain? And what really is the precipitating factor that builds this friendship? After all, the dark clouds of this new friendship eventually, as the tug at my suspicious gut made me worry, begin to gather overhead, at first shading this cheery friendship then threatening to storm and bring perhaps lasting damage.
The hardest part of the film for me was believing that Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts were closer to 42 than 48. (I realize these ages are close, but their stated ages on screen really made me scoff.) Stiller and Watts, though, were fine in their roles, Watts continuing to impress me with her variety of acting styles, and Stiller delivering his familiar humor. And I loved seeing Adam Driver in another role, Driver becoming more and more interesting as I see him in different roles, my first exposure to him being his fantastic performance in HBO’s Girls (even if his character is a bit distasteful in that).
Personally, with friends of varying ages, I can see how the mixes of ages and generations in friendships can be fantastic, learning from each other’s perspectives, growing from each other’s respective energy and wisdom, and appreciating where we each are in our own lives. And I can appreciate different stages of life: when staying out until all hours might be the higher priority on one’s list than is enjoying the early mornings and the good feeling of getting regular nights’ sleep on a regular basis (and when one *needs* that sleep more 😉 ). I can also appreciate the dance in the 40s, the cha cha of visiting that youthful time in one’s past while also suddenly greatly enjoying quieter nights, and with those visits often becoming less frequent, like trips to your high school town once you graduate college and start a new life. Once the dance begins to end, we see those who stay on the dance floor, clinging desperately to a younger self as if continuing to live life as those younger is a way to be younger.
The movie foreshadowed a good bit of what was to come, but it wasn’t too heavy. The scenes played out well enough with some surprises, some nuanced unexpected twists. But I didn’t really buy this young couple’s discarding today’s technological world. Granted, this was not your average mid/early-20s couple but instead more of a modern-day hippie couple, or at least that’s what they appeared.
There is something refreshing in a film that takes a couple through a midlife crisis together, but I was disappointed as the movie, instead of letting our couple find their happiness in a nontraditional way, having been released from society’s expectations by their experience with the younger couple, the movie takes them back down the safe, predictable path, wrapping it all up nicely with a bow as if everyone’s life is your storybook happily ever after. Then again, that might speak better to the masses, so I do understand the choice in that path for the film.
So while enjoyable and pleasant, the movie wasn’t particularly remarkable. But when you want to be entertained, it certainly was enough for that.