While We're Young, the A side

While We're young and Mistress America were both movies directed by Noah Baumbach and they came out within six months of each other and this is rare in any era but even more so now when the industry is gauged on the big blockbuster. The two movies are definitely similar in style, and after seeing Mistress America I wanted to say that it was a compendium to While We're Young, and the two really should be seen in a double feature, or as one long continuous whole. For starters, they both take place in contemporary NYC, and both are obvious attempts by Baumbach to join the maninstream, or to make movies more accessible to more people. It's not that Greenberg or Francis Ha were inaccessible, and if anything one of Baumbach's saving graces is that he always seems to have an audience in mind and doesn't try to alienate them too much, but his movies can be more or less artsy, and While We're Young and Mistress America fall into the less artsy category, but boy does that sound degrading to art. Regarding Noah Baumbach, what I mean by artsy could probably best be summed up by Margot's Wedding, a movie he made in the early 2000's, that I doubt many people saw. It was influenced by the darker movies of Woody Allen and definitely had a literary feel to it. It was also a very depressing movie about two sisters battling it out for men, and maybe in the '70's one could imagine people paying money to see it, critics debating it, film scholars making a living deciding how important it was, but we live in a different era of extended media, and I don't think anyone was doing this with Margot's Wedding. It had a strong cast of Gen X actors (Jack Black, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicole Kidman), but one could easily argue that Margot was a rebuttal against the soft indie pop of "The Squid and the Whale," that launched Baumbach in my mind.

I'm not sure where Greenberg sits on the Baumbach continuum but I think without a doubt it is the movie he is going to be remembered for, the one that was a game changer, and that people may watch years from now to understand what it was like to be an aging Gen X'er. Personally, it's my favorite movie by Baumbach, but I have a feeling I'm not the only one. It really is Baumbach's most singular work, the one where he took all of his influences, and made them into something completely personal, by literally creating an unforgettable character out of thin air. I think a lot about how artists are often remembered for one important work, one game changer, and if they are lucky maybe they have two or three, and then a spattering of work that falls under the umbrealla of their pivotal pieces. Greenberg was Baumbach's pivotal work both in his life and his art, though I don't know much about his life, except that he ended up dating (living with?) Greta Gerwig after it, and she was Greenbergs love interest, so that's big right off the bat. I get the sense that all of his work is going to be compared heretofore to Greenberg, and his earlier work is going to be largely forgotten, no matter how entertaining, quirky, or brilliant. I just wiki'd his oevure (oh, the shame), and I'll hold to my opinion.

While We're Young and Mistress America taken together seem like a really big movie to me, and the real stardust to come out of Greenberg. Gerwig was absent from While We're Young, but starred in Frances Ha, a movie that the critics loved but very few people saw, and though it had Baumbach's stamp of authenticity, there was something about it that felt derivative, no matter how good it was. Frances Ha was shot in black and white and without doubt Baumbach was going for the revolutionary filmmaking style of Jean Luc Godard, and the French New Wave, a group that Tarantino has also taken on (along with blaxploitation and karate movies), and in that way just doesn't feel as personal. Sure, it's Greta Gerwig's big coming out as the greatest indie actress of her generation, so it feels weird to bad mouth Frances Ha, especially since I enjoyed it immensely, but it felt like it was under the umbrella of Greenberg. I don't think Baumbach knew how he was going to follow up Greenberg, so decided to do another generational character study but this time of a Gen Y woman, and what a woman she is. I don't talk much about acting in these reviews but Gerwig is really something to watch, the best of Gen Y, and I'd say I'm in love with her performances in Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress America, all equally, though MIstress America may have been her tour de force.

Frances Ha was a very tasteful movie that my parents generation could really get behind, but I felt that somehow Baumbach was missing what it felt like to be Gen Y living in New York City in the early '10's. I'm pretty sure he cowrote the script with Gerwig, but I felt somehow Baumbach's intellectualization of Gen Y was like reading a book, rather than living a story, but this made sense. Baumbach is Gen X, Baumbach is a man, Baumbach was in love with Jennifer Jason Leigh (she has a small but potent role in Greenberg, especially given the divorce), and Baumbach is in love with Gerwig, like Roger Greenberg. No, Baumbach wasn't a guy in an '80's post-punk band that didn't sign that big record contract because of his ideals against corporate rock, but Baumbach was an artist in the '80's like Roger Greenberg, and this was the charater he was meant to portray. Frances Ha was an invention to me but a brilliant one that I don't want to dissuade people from watching, but it felt like an anomaly, a pretty little picture alone on an island, about an artist losing her ground quietly.

While We're Young looked like the second coming of Greenberg because Ben Stiller was the star and playing a Gen X guy going through a mid life meltdown like Greenberg. But they weren't the same character. The guy in While We're Young was a documentary filmmaker who had promise once, but clearly had lost his moment, so maybe he actually was just like Greenberg, and I got it all wrong. The difference is he's a middle age man clinging to his dream of finishing his life's work that he's spent way too much time on, but must now see to its end. Greenberg didn't have anything like this, and instead had basically given up on music to be a carpenter, though there was a part of him that wanted to play guitar with his old band mates, but it was a remote part. The character in While We're Young was fully engaged with his documentary about Turkish politics, or something like that, and is living the life of a Brooklyn artist. The protagonist in While We're Young hasn't even come close to hitting Greenberg's despair, and yet there is Greenberg within him, because he's played by Ben Stiller and the character on the page has similar dimensions, but not exactly the same. For starters, Greenberg was alone, but the main character in While We're Young is married to Naomi Watts, and even has a father in law who was a famous '60's documentary filmmaker, played well by Charles Grodin.

Then there's the plot, or the second act, that's nothing like Greenberg. The protagonist basically meets a younger version of himself, or what he wants to be, and starts a friendship with some Gen Y'ers. I can't say this is a part of the film I think about too much six months later, and I should also say that parts of the film just bored me in a way that Mistress America didn't. I thought Stiller's performance was off, though not belligerently, but just enough to skew the vision. He was playing Greenberg but not getting the laughs because it was a different movie in many ways. It wasn't an art movie like the others striving to be something original, but rather a cliche striving to be true, a mainstream hit. I didn't laugh as much as I wanted to and whenever I'm watching a comedy the first criteria is 'is it funny?' If it's not, it has failed, and While We're Young wasn't funny. In fact, what tied it all together for me was the 3rd act, and that's rare because I don't usually think of the 3rd act as bringing home the bacon, but really that's what it does. I think the second act was supposed to show how Stiller and Watts getting seduced by the Gen Y'ers and there is even a drug scene where they all take a weird psychedelic, and are changed, but none of these scenes worked for me. The only movie that comes to mind is "I love You Alice B. Toklas," where the square straight Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) meets a hippie and becomes one but the generational struggle here wasn't as intense. For starters, Stiller and Adam Driver, the Gen Y'er, are both documentary filmmakers, and it's not like one is a corporate lawyer and the other a free spirit, a more '60's story. It's almost like they are the same person but at different ages in different times of their life, so Stiller is looking at a reflection of himself that he wishes he could capture, nothing like Harold Fine abandoning the old life for the new.

The really defining moment of While We're Young comes in the 3rd act because Stiller sees how he was played by the Gen Y'er as an in to his father in law, a famous documentarian, who could vaunt the young and ambitious Driver. Of course, Stiller was caught up in his ego and really thought that he was teaching his Gen Y protegee, but the opposite was happening, and he has a series of flashbacks over the scenes we had just seen, and is reinterpreting them as a hustle. This may have been one of the best parts of the film, actually, and though I don't believe this entirely, a part of me thought the boredom of much of the movie, the missed jokes, or broken plot, were all intended to show what a ruse the whole friendship had been, but that's theoretical. While We're Young was a comedy/drama, but not a dramedy, though it slipped into that for a montage or two and the drama worked for me in the 3rd act.

Stiller goes to a big film festival bash to find his stepfather in bed with Adam Driver, his protegee, and even though Stiller has proof that Driver plagiarized part of his film, no one really cares, and the disillusionment that Stiller feels is very real. It may be his most Greenberg like moment in the movie. He didn't let a record contract go but to give Greenberg credit he didn't like the corporate record companies, and in the end the character in While We're Young is the same, but much more dim witted. He realizes he's an idealist compared to his father in law, or Driver, and you have to do what it takes to make it in the documentary film world, even if his movie sucked. The truth was it didn't matter if your movie sucked or not, what mattered was who made it. The problem with While We're Young aside from not being funny enough, was that Stiller and the script in general was too tied to Greenberg to be original enough, and the tone was thoughtfully mainstream, as if it was conceding to a norm that it deemed worthy. It was never going to be as good as Greenberg, so why not make it a hit.

Mistress America had almost none of this connection to me. Ben Stiller was nowhere to be found in the cast, and more importantly the focus wasn't on Gen X, but Gen Y, and how it interpreted Gen X. It really felt more like Gerwig's movie to me, and I found it much funnier than While We're Young, and more charming. It also felt like a real Gen Y story through the eyes of a near millennial, and in that way felt much truer to Gen Y than the very artful Frances Ha, that was more French New Wave. I'd say Mistress America is one of those instances where the B side tops the A side.