Reseñas de la crítica

There’s an element of truth to Baumbach’s critique of today’s young “creatives”, but not much more... The plot of While We’re Young feels more like a nail on which Baumbach can hang an argument, staged with himself, about the role of a director and the nature of cinematic truth. It’s a worthwhile field of enquiry, made into a strangely self-satisfied film.

I am far from being an unconditional fan of the prolific Noah Baumbach, but I was more than pleasantly surprised by this inventively brisk tale—broadly in the Woody Allen school—of the interrelation of couples from two different generations. Personal adventure here harbors illusion and disappointment, and friendship can so easily give way to manipulation and betrayal.

It's rich material for satire, initially poking equal fun at the smugness of new parents, the ostentatious liberalism of reigning hipsters, principally represented by a brilliant Adam Driver, and the desperation of their predecessors as they rage against the dying of the light. Halfway through, however, Baumbach's world view turns oddly prescriptive, its loose-limbed social observation tethered by a snoozy inside-baseball subplot on documentary ethics.

The result isn’t entirely riotous... yet Baumbach weaves in plenty of droll observations about the bittersweet burden of middle age and the millennial tendency to transform yesterday’s nostalgia into today’s kitsch.

Baumbach mines some great jokes from his unusual take on the generation gap during the film's first half... [However,] there's a plot twist regarding somebody's motives that shoves the movie in an overly cynical direction, to the point where it feels more like the kind of film Neil LaBute used to make 10 or 15 years ago—stuff like In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. That's not a good fit for Baumbach, who's at his best when any bitterness is accompanied by a heavy splash of wry.

While We’re Young has the golden feel of a lifetime’s obsession, the sense that Baumbach has spent so long observing the ghastliness of hipsters in Brooklyn that he now simply has to get it all down in one long, dramatic evacuation.

This is certainly the most likable movie he’s ever made – funnier, more rounded, more insightful and less self-consciously arch than previous works. It still has an edge, but it’s tempered with experience.

While We’re Young is possibly Baumbach’s most accessible film to date — it shares that same squirming comedy of discomfort as his best work, the same clammy embrace of humiliation. But there’s a warmth present here that was notably absent in the abrasive navel-gazing of Greenberg and the acid-bath of Margot at the Wedding...

Baumbach has produced another excruciatingly pleasurable and wince-inducing study in insecurity.

In any other hands, this many post-millennial signifiers in one film would be insufferable. But Baumbach has such an assured touch that what might have been a lazy burlesque becomes instead a thoughtful and resonant depiction of midlife anxiety — including but not limited to regret, compromise, envy and aspiration.

Most richly farcical of all is an ayahuasca party where the guests get high on the sludgy Peruvian hallucinogen to the strains of Vangelis while a shaman exhorts them to "breathe in truth – breathe out ignorance" and most of those present vomit thunderously into thoughtfully provided brass vessels. It's at this event that Cornelia kisses Jamie, but nothing much comes of it; one of the film's strengths is that an all-too-expected recoupling of the four leads never happens.

Baumbach had his own fling with cinematic youth—he was one of the producers of Joe Swanberg's 2009 film "Alexander the Last," and there's an odd detail reflecting this connection: Darby is an artisanal ice-cream maker, as is Swanberg's wife, Kris (who is also a filmmaker). Baumbach is similarly squeezed, generationally, between the elder colossi, whether Martin Scorsese or Terrence Malick, with their titanically inventive daring, and young independents such as Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski...