Comedy really is hard. So it's a kick when a filmmaker gets it right, as Noah Baumbach does in this stingingly funny take on aging.
While We’re Young***3/4
Dir: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts
Comedy really is hard. So it’s a kick when a filmmaker gets it right, as Noah Baumbach does in this stingingly funny take on aging. While We’re Young, which finds humor in the broken places, reunites Baumbach with his Greenberg star Ben Stiller. Stiller’s Josh Srebnick isn’t the total jerk this time. But Josh is just as neurotic. He’s a documentarian who’s been fiddling for a decade on his latest work. His wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), inadvertently put Josh in the shadow of docu master Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin). He’s her dad.
But the real threat in the mind of fortysomething Josh is youth, expressed in a quote from Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder that opens the film. Josh and Cornelia feel alienated from their age-appropriate, kid-focused BFFs, played by Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz. Cornelia and Josh have adjusted to being childless.
What to do? Fraternize with twentysomethings in the persons of Jamie (Girls’ Adam Driver), a wanna-be filmmaker who kisses Josh’s ass at every opportunity, and his wife, Darby (Amanda Seyfried), who takes Cornelia to hip-hop dance classes. Baumbach scores many a caustic laugh at the expense of watching Josh and Cornelia try to recapture their youth. But compassion also seeps through the cracks. Stiller is killer at blending wit with physical comedy. His scenes with the gifted Driver, playing a careerist in hipster’s clothing, escalate into generational comic warfare of a high order. Though Baumbach lets his themes run off course as the film progresses, he sure as hell touches a raw nerve.
Serena *1/4
Dir: Susanne Bier
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence
So you think Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper are invincible onscreen? Ha! Serena is damning evidence to the contrary. Lawrence shot this folly between two David O. Russell films, her Oscar-crowned Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, both with Cooper. They will survive. Audiences forced to endure the 109 coma-inducing minutes of Serena should bring an e-book or a soft pillow.
What led the actors astray? Ron Rash’s 2008 novel won raves. And director Susanne Bier guided the Danish film In a Better World to a foreign-language Oscar in 2011. Maybe the script, by Christopher Kyle, would play better in Danish, since Lawrence and Cooper nearly choke on their dialogue.
He plays George Pemberton, a Depression-era logging tycoon who brings his bride, Serena (Lawrence), home to North Carolina to watch him make his fortune. Serena doesn’t watch. She’s a doer. Rachel (Ana Ularu), the townie who spewed out George’s bastard kid, is screwed, especially when Serena miscarries. Serena’s descent into madness and murder sparks a storm of overacting that makes the Macbeths look like introverts and reduces this misbegotten lumber-world tragedy to splinters. Left for dead since 2012, Serena would better serve its stars by burial, not resurrection.
- Rolling Stone