In the new comedy While We're Young, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a middle-aged Brooklyn couple wary of what lies ahead. They make friends with a pair of hipster twenty-somethings (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) with no interest in growing up. The older folks are rejuvenated. Then they realize their fountain of youth carries a bitter aftertaste.
The movie's quartet might not realize it, but they're playing out a set of fears and desires that permeates American culture in the 21st century, a time when the idea of adulthood is harder to define than ever and not particularly appealing. As University of Texas at Austin history professor Steven Mintz writes in his new book The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (Belknap Press, $35): "Adulthood, once regarded as life's pinnacle, has come to be seen by many as a time of stress, remorse, routine, stagnation and dissatisfaction."
Who wants that? Certainly not Stiller's Josh, fretting over his arthritis, failing images and stalled career. Or Watts' Cornelia, resigned to a life without kids but wanting something more than her everyday existence can offer. Meanwhile, Driver's Jamie and Seyfried's Darby live a life of bohemian rhapsody, from an eclectic vinyl library to artisan ice cream.
"They're all about themselves," Driver says by phone. "They don't have very much responsibility, and they can move around without things holding them down. Their carefreeness is hugely attractive."
While We're Young is fiendishly smart about a particular kind of midlife crisis that afflicts the urban hipster. We don't buy Ferraris; most of us can't afford them. But we find other diversions: collecting sneakers, wearing witty T-shirts (guilty as charged), obsessively keeping up with the latest pop music (again, guilty as charged) or tech gadgets. If we could age backward, like Benjamin Button, we probably would. Instead we find it easy to emulate the arrested-development cases that populate Judd Apatow movies.
Perhaps some of us will always feel more comfortable in a pair of jeans than a suit and tie, or prefer renting to buying. It's hard to say that makes us less adult, especially as the definitions of adulthood applied by previous generations seem to apply less and less with each passing year.
"Adulthood used to be defined by leaving school, getting married, having a steady job, bearing children, buying a house," says Mintz by phone. "Today none of those things really explain when you're an adult. It's more a psychological definition. It's when you feel independent, when you feel responsible for yourself. That's all harder to pin down."
Josh and Cornelia have reached a point where days fly by like minutes and start piling up at their feet. "I'm 44, and there are things I will never do," Josh laments. "Things I will never have. What's the opposite of 'The world is your oyster?'" Cornelia starts taking a hip-hop dance class; the film uses hip-hop as a sort of shorthand for youth, but winks at the idea by casting the Beastie Boys' 48-year-old Adam Horowitz as a new father who shakes his head at Josh and Cornelia's desperate inability to act their age.
According to Mintz, who has also published a history of childhood (Huck's Raft) and is working on a history of old age, the fear of growing up is common, but also misplaced. We may miss our young, flexible bodies, but do we really want to be 25 again? All that uncertainty. All that arrogance. Ah, youth. Always wasted on the young.
For all the fretting, Mintz says middle age is the place to be.
"It's easy to see why people dread middle age, but I'm convinced it really is the prime of life," Mintz says. "You're more mature. The relationships you develop are more meaningful. Hopefully you've developed a craft that you're proud of."
That doesn't sound bad at all. As long as you can afford the artisan ice cream.
