Struggles

My wife and I went to see "While We're Young" at the moving picture show a few days back. It was okay. As a movie, it was an okay way to spend a couple hours. We were out of the house. There was popcorn and a big soda. There was Ben Stiller. There was butter on the popcorn. It was fine.
Fine. Not a great big lollapalooza of a CGI extravaganza with lines around the block. Fine. Not that we would have expected Noah Baumbach to give us anything with robots or lasers, having previously directed quiet, angry little movies like "The Squid and the Whale." What were we expecting? It wasn't going to be a laugh riot. It was going to be introspective little slice of humor. Like "Greenberg." Not a blockbuster. Just a quiet afternoon at the movies. An afternoon during which we were asked to consider our place in society and what our generation is doing with their lives. Ben plays a guy who is married to a gal played by Naomi Watts, and they live Woody Allen type lives of quiet desperation with built-in schadenfreude snickers. These snickers escalate to knowing nods of self-awareness when this forty-something couple crosses paths with their twenty-something doppelgangers. The fact that they have another couple of forty-something friends, one of whom was played by Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, with their first baby made the choice obvious. Obvious? Did I say, "obvious?" Maybe in the world of cinema, where we learn lessons by watching others make bad choices and we leave the theater talking about how we would have handled that situation.
My wife and I are in our fifties. We don't have friends half our age. We don't get invited (spoiler alert) to ritualized ceremonies of hallucinogen ingestion. We don't. We do find ourselves wondering about our paths in life. We do look at the choices we have made and ask each other if we could have done more. Or less. It's just not very cinematic or dramatic. That's why we go to the movies.
That's why, when we left the theater, we tried to figure out if we had a good time. Which is why my next screenplay is all about a couple, in their fifties, who stand outside a multiplex struggling with the indecision created by all those movies, all those times, all those formats. What brings them together? Butter on their popcorn.