Director: Noah Baumbach
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 2.0
A middle-aged couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), befriend a "younger" couple, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), and start spending time together - coincidentally, both Josh and Jamie are interested in documentary filmmaking and start kind-of/sort-of collaborating on Jamie's new project about a War veteran. Baumbach sets it up as a too-simple dichotomy - Josh's adherence to the "ethics" and "purity" of documentary making versus Jamie's "faux-truth," Josh and Cornelia's appropriation of technology versus Jamie and Darby's conscious rejection of "the new," etc. - so when the movie ends up with Stiller's character ranting about his "protégé's" shadiness it just comes across as a Grumpy Codger move, with Baumbach essentially barking at the hipsters to get off his lawn (Baumbach conveniently forgets to mention that Robert Flaherty, a pioneer in documentary filmmaking, didn't necessarily adhere to the "perfect truth" either and may have even staged several scenes). It's too bitter and condescending to be funny, and the notion that having a child "fixes" Stiller and Watts' troubled marriage is a bit hard to accept.
