The New Age (1994)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I liked this film because it does a good job of making the viewer consider what is important in life, and why. On the other hand, it is not the most exciting movie ever made. I recommend this if you want a story to ponder that exposes modern values to criticism. I give it a 7/10.Peter and Katherine are a typical couple of California yuppies. They want to be cool, the want to indulge themselves, they live lavishly on their credit cards, and they hold "spiritual values" above wealth and work. Unfortunately, when their careers go down the toilet during the recession in the early 1990s, they fall upon hard times. They try to start an independent business, but their easy and hedonistic lifestyle prevents them from putting in the blood, sweat, and tears that are required for success in retail. Their spiritual values are of no help when things get rough, because their "New Age" values are really just a justification for selfishness and egocentricity.The movie is the story of their loss of innocence. To get their lives back on track, they have to work hard at jobs that simply are not cool. Their elitist attitudes must give way to sacrifice and common sense. It is not clear whether this is a triumph or a tragedy for Peter and Katherine. That is left up to the viewer in this one.

Yuppie couple. Falls on hard times. After too many good times. Lose jobs. Have affairs. Have crisis of identity. Then set up in business.That's a rough sketch of what happens, and it's quite watchable. Judy Davis looks incredibly young and sexy. So does Peter Weller. And it's written by Olly Stone too...What more do people want?I Never 'New' It Was This Good!!!

The previous reviewer's comments mysteriously do not allude to the terrific humor of this film. It is a clever, understated, totally deadpan comedy. If you like black, dry humor, this film is for you. At the same time it skewers the vapidly self-affirming culture of the wealthy, new age set. Slowly, Peter Weller and Judy Davis's characters' natures are purified in the furnace of self-destruction, until they discover their true selves -- mediocrity and greed, which lately pretended to be new age spirituality. A succession of fatuous gurus pushes them down the slope of destruction, until finally Samuel Jackson, in a fabulous cameo, teaches Peter Weller how to attain ultimate truth through techniques of visualization. By this point, the Davis-Weller characters have lost their jobs, their wealth, their "friends", their home, their failed business, and their relationship (did I mention the affairs?), and, perhaps, all illusions that there was anything at their core.With the exception of one or two scenes, everything in this film is deliciously subtle and understated, but all the more wickedly funny for it. You might not realize how good it is at first. A second viewing will really help your appreciation of it.If this film doesn't make you laugh, grasshopper, then perhaps you still do not know yourself.

"The New Age" is deep satire which runs the gamut of things 90's. Using a Davis and Weller, a 40ish L.A. married couple, as a centerpiece, the film attempts to depict the emptiness of the hedonistic, materialistic, and morally bankrupt life style of the "new age" as it follows the principals from schmoozfests to open marriages to euthanasia to spiritual healing to spas and massages to orgies, etc, all the while portraying the characters as subtle exaggerations which are likely to go over with most audiences like a lead balloon. This unfortunate product by Tolkin starts like serious drama and slowly drifts in limbo somewhere between satire and realism so as to leave many wondering why the film was made and why they bothered to watch it.