Cornelia (Naomi Watts) and Josh (Ben Stiller) are forty-something and haven’t got much to show for their lives. They don’t’ own a home, they never had kids and as a matter of fact, Josh, has been filming the same documentary for 10 years now. Basically with all their freedom and spare time, there was never a sense of urgency to move them along.
Then they happen upon Darby (Amanda Seyfried) who invents organic ice cream and her boyfriend, Jamie (Adam Driver) also a documentary filmmaker. The two are twenty-something and an outlook of simplistic but somehow entitled. They have not want not, yet somehow they do…and still expect the older couple (Stiller and Watts) to pay for dinner whenever the check arrives. They’re today’s generation…much like Adam Driver portrays on GIRLS. Whining, living, in NYC, unable to make ends meet but indifferent to understanding how their behavior might be inconsiderate to us, the generation who strove to have more and more.
We were success oriented, and they’re just oblivious…living in the moment with nothing to show. So who’s got it right? The film becomes the collision of values, somehow derailing along the way. At a certain point we lose interest in either couple despite Stiller’s desperation for answers.
What is refreshing is Stiller’s take on his sudden need for reading glasses, and an arthritis diagnosis…or in other words…the things that are only supposed to happen when we’re older are suddenly happening now.
Not sure what the film’s real point was except that perhaps each generation has its own evil. ♚ ♛ 1/2
Two and a half tiaras