He really started noticing the camera when he was about three. That is, he'd seen it before, but that's the age when he really started to understand what it meant, and that I was looking at him. I don't know that it was self-consciousness, exactly, though that came too, eventually. But sometimes he didn't want to play along, and so he began to hide himself. He would duck his head down, or sometimes simply close his eyes in protest. Back then, it came with a scowl.

That was when I started asking his permission to take the pictures.

Nowadays, he will agree or disagree to being in a picture. Sometimes he will come along grudgingly, sometimes with enthusiasm. Sometimes not at all. Just before I took this picture, I told him that the light was really nice, and asked him if he would sit up so I could take a picture. He said OK, and closed his eyes. I asked him if he was sure it was OK, and he patiently said yes, so I clicked the shutter.

Shortly afterwards, a mischievous grin stole across his face and he pulled his pants down, shoving his back side toward the lens. "Take a picture of that!" he shouted gleefully.

So I did.

He said it was his favorite picture ever.

There's been a lot of new construction in the neighborhoods where I live and work. The city sets aside certain areas as "wildlife corridors"; the intention is to allow the local fauna some space to hunt, get access to water, breed, and get from one place to another without getting hit by a car. In the ten years that I've lived here, these corridors haven't gotten any narrower, but the edges have gotten a lot more defined as the houses have gotten closer.

Juliette sometimes looks at photos and says that his feet look like mine. His toes haven't quite lost that round, chubby, baby toe-ness, not yet. But his feet are getting longer and narrower.

Last night he decided that he wanted to take a shower—I think he was tired of waiting for his sister to finish her chores. He doesn't do this often yet, but he will. And then this kind of picture—of which I must have hundreds—will get fewer and farther between. The girls will still be taking baths for a while, of course. I suppose that softens the blow a bit, but each child is an individual, and parenting each one is its own story. Having younger kids doesn't really make me miss the oldest's littleness any less.

There’s a moment late in While We’re Young where Ben Stiller’s character, Josh, is in the middle of a moral outrage-fueled rant, and his elder-statesman filmmaker father-in-law (Charles Grodin) says to him something like “It doesn’t have to be one way.” I don’t know if writer-director Noah Baumbach intended for that to be a comment on his film as a whole, but it’s that scene that keeps coming to mind as I’ve been mulling over what I think of the movie.

While We’re Young appears at first glance to be a comedy about Josh’s mid-life crisis. Josh is a mid-career, middle-aged documentarian, frustrated by a decade-long project whose resolution continues to elude him. After meeting their best friends’ new baby, he and his wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), return home and have nothing to talk about but a series of what feel like familiar rationalizations: “We’re happy not having kids. We’re free. We could go off to Rome tomorrow if we felt like it.” The dissatisfaction, of course, shows right through.

Soon after, a young, aspiring filmmaker named Jamie (Adam Driver) and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) approach Josh after a continuing ed class Josh teaches, telling him that they’re fans and asking for guidance. They strike up a friendship, and Josh and Cornelia quickly become enchanted with and invigorated by the younger couple’s youthful energy and neo-bohemian lifestyle.

There’s a lot of comedy that can be mined from the juxtaposition of the two couples, and the film does. Still, it’s hard to know exactly what Baumbach thinks about it all. The easy laughs mostly come from the foolishness, the trying-too-hard vibe you get from Josh’s trying to ingratiate himself with the new friends who are close to half his age. That plays well into a critical tone that the movie takes toward the preciousness and pretentiousness of millenial hipsterism. They make everything! They’re all about the moment and the art and the authenticity! Isn’t that great! (No, not really.)

On the other hand, it’s not as though Baumbach spares Josh’s (that is, his own) generation much. There’s as much scorn for the disconnected, screen-driven tedium of the aging Gen-Xers as there is for anything else. In one montage we see Josh and Cornelia mostly experiencing their marriage in parallel, never intersecting—one watches YouTube videos while the other plays Two Dots, or one watches TV while the other is absorbed in a Kindle—which contrasts with the easy connection between Darby and Jamie, who spend their evenings entwined in each others’ arms, sprawled on a couch watching a VHS tape together, or playing a vintage board game.

There’s no real resolution here. At times in the movie, the millenial life seems warm and adventurous; at others it’s shallow and self-absorbed. Sometimes Gen-X middle age seems to be full of hard-won truths, honesty, perspective, reality; sometimes it’s just cold and disaffected. Even though Josh and Cornelia eventually figure out their own path forward, and head down it with enthusiasm, Baumbach isn’t interested in letting that stand—the very last shot of the movie is a giant question mark.

The thing is, in life there aren’t easy answers, and things don’t have to be one way or the other. So maybe I could laud Baumbach for making a movie that doesn’t aim for safe, pat comfort. Still, stories aren’t life. Art is something that people make, intentionally, for a reason. I tend to want a narrative to come with a point.

Still, I can’t deny that there’s something familiar here. If not in the movie itself, then perhaps in between the lines, in the way it’s put together. Right now I’m rounding the corner into the back half of my thirties, coming to terms with certain realities about my life, and struggling to find my place as an emerging artist. I find myself wanting to grapple with big questions, while at the same time feeling arrogant and hypocritical for assuming I have anything to add to these conversations. This tension between self-aggrandizement and self-loathing seems to be the underlying drive of the whole process of While We’re Young, at least, if I’m reading it right. It feels like the kind of thing I would make, if I were making movies about myself (instead of making photographs and writing essays about myself).

Is a narrative film with a public release the right place to deal with that internal struggle? I don’t know. Maybe you’d find such a movie resonant, insightful. Maybe you’d find it narcissistic. I can’t even make up my own mind at this point, but if nothing else it’s something else for me to chew on while I wrestle with my own questions—and, you know, things don’t have to be one way.

Viewed: 2015-04-25 | Released: 2015-03-27 | Score: B-

IMDb Page

"Dinner is just about ready," I say. "It's time to clean up and come inside."

"OK!" she says.

A few minutes later I return. She is stooped over in the middle of lawn, picking up leaves one by one. The yard is still littered with toys.

"Eve, come on," I say. "You can play with the leaves some other time. You have to clean up and come in to dinner now."

"No! I'm not playing!" she insists. "I have to put the leaves in my collection!"

Around the corner, next to the crowd of tricycles and scooters, lies a little pile of yellow and green, fading to brown. She crouches down and places the leaf in her fingers right in the middle.

"Is that your collection?" I ask.

"Yes," she says. She's so proud.

I don't know why fingers get wrinkly when you've been in the pool or the bath too long. I don't know why she wants to wear her goggles in the pool when she refuses to put her face in the water. There are lots of things I don't know. That's just how it is.

The light that enters your eye makes a circle on your retina, an illuminated disc that has a defined border. Do you ever think about that edge? Inside is everything you see, from the sharp center to the fuzzy periphery. It feels like everything, but cross that line and suddenly there's nothing. Not darkness; nothing. Trace a line across the back of your head from one ear to the other—what's back there? Blackness? Void? No, but whatever it is, you are simply unaware of it. Will you poke at those boundaries, try to fix them in your sights? Perhaps from the corner of your eye, track a fingertip as you move it backwards, until finally it passes from view? Things simply become indistinct, without beginning or end.

Just like life.

They found a worm that had died after the sprinklers had been on. They felt it deserved a proper burial, so they built a little cairn and solemnly stood over it, and said a few words.

Afterwards, he told me I should call this picture "Our friend the dead, bloody worm."

Sometimes I think that if I could catalog everything I ever did wrong,
Stick a pin through every prejudice and privilege,
Put every passing meanness behind glass
With a little paper label beside it,
Time and date and explanatory text,
“In 2013, he didn’t appreciate the things he had,”
Well then I’d really have something to feel good about.

It is October. A cool morning that settled into a pleasantly warm Saturday afternoon, the way an October Saturday does in San Diego. Around the house, the Halloween decorations have begun going up, and the kids are excited. They have only recently finished being excited about a birthday, and soon they will be excited about Christmas. Every season has its presents or candies to look forward to. Sometimes both.

By this time she is three, but on the wall she is still a baby, and her brother is barely done being a toddler.

There above the dining table she is still a baby today, younger than her baby sister. And—for now—she is the same age as the brother that smiles above the spot where she used to eat her cereal. The brother that eats his cereal in the living room these days is, of course, still her senior.

If the shift in tense is confusing, just stop and consider the layers of "now" that are in that kitchen. An October afternoon. A morning in May. An April weekday as I write this. Whenever it is that you read it. Photography is weird.