Each of director Noah Baumbach’s films so far has been incredibly rich and insightful treatises on life and this title is no different. This is even a much more ambitious and wide-ranging film than the other two we’ve watched and it features a quite different cast. Not all of its themes gel together perfectly but I would still quite happily call it brilliant.

Josh and Cordelia are a middle-aged couple who have been married for some time. He is a director who made a notable documentary but has spent the last 10 years working on his second film while she works for her father who is a very successful documentary director himself. After a class at the college where he teaches, Josh meets Jamie, a young aspiring filmmaker, together with his wife Darby. Jamie confesses that he is a fan and the two couples soon become friends though initially it feels odd to them as a couple in their 40s to hang out with a couple in their 20s. At the same time they feel alienated from their existing friends of the same age as they all have children of their own. Later Josh offers to help Jamie with his own film that at first begins with physically reconnecting with old friends found on Facebook but becomes much more interesting with the friend turns out to be a war veteran who was based in Afghanistan. But after Jamie connects with his father-in-law, Josh suspects that Jamie had planned out their entire relationship from the beginning and some aspects of his so-called documentary are too good to be true.

There’s a lot going on in this film, possibly too much to digest. The bits about Josh and Cordelia fitting in poorly with both the 20-something and the 40-something couples are entertaining and hilarious. There’s a lot of heart as well in Cordelia deciding that she doesn’t want children more out of fear that they will be disappointed again after two miscarriages than anything else. Then there’s all the stuff about the evolution of documentary filmmaking and how faithful to the truth they ought to be. Particularly intriguing is the idea that as smartphones are now ubiquitous and people everywhere are constantly filming everything, the footage itself is not particularly valuable. What is valuable is the director’s ability to forge a compelling narrative out of the footage and it is at this point that one asks whether or not that needs to be honest and true when the footage is itself real. You can even go deeper and examine whether or not the fundamental dishonesty of people like Jamie who outwards evinces a particular lifestyle and set of values that disdains success but deep inside is actually hungry for it really matters at all. This is an incredibly rich film by any measure, one that will provide plenty of fodder for later analysis and conversation.

As my wife notes however the transition from one theme to another is kind of rough and gives the impression that the argument isn’t in favor of the 20-somethings due to Jamie’s deceit. This isn’t really fair and ends with a weak conclusion that maybe Josh and Cordelia ought to act like the 40-somethings that they are after all. At the same time I also think the film gives Jamie’s actions too much of a pass. I think the market does care about authenticity and the false narrative that Jamie creates to sell his film should have serious consequences for his reputation if it were publicly exposed.

Flaws aside I do think this is another excellent film by
Baumbach and yet more evidence of his keen insight into the human condition. Another thing worth noting is that while the acting, cinematography and so forth are okay, it’s really just the writing itself that makes this film stand out. I’m not even a big fan of casting Ben Stiller in this as he seems a little too manic. I’m impressed by the ambition and imagination of welding such disparate themes together and even if it’s not perfect, it’s not such a bad job either.