Deniro's character from the wrong era

But a huge angle of this movie is to illustrate the generation gap -- and he's simply not acting like a "representative" member of his generation but instead like someone who would have been considered old-fashioned when he himself was 30.

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I agree, johnsonium. Some people are squarer than others. He was a company man for 40 years for a boring phone book company. He was a "dull businessman" a real square. But also a good person, not to be sucked in by wild self-indulgence. Some of us are like that.

No, of course that's not the case. But as I pointed out above, a major part of this movie was devoted to illustrating the generation gap between Deniro and his coworkers. But my feeling is that his character would be considered an old fart by the members of his OWN generation!

Those Mad Men characters were already in a professional setting in 1960, when Deniro's character would have still been in high school. Plus, they were largely misogynistic pricks.

Pete would have been Silent Generation, born in the 1930s. Most of the young worker bees and "company men" of the early 60s were Silents--the generation where "90% of success is showing up".

Ben was a Boomer, albeit an early "War Baby" Boomer (born around 1943, if he graduated college in 1965). This is pretty much right on the line between Silents and Boomers, and many of this group (such as my oldest aunt) have aspects of the Silent Gen and are more conservative in manner. And yeah, not all Boomers got into the counterculture. Some went right into the workaday world, oftentimes out of necessity. My father (early Boomer) was like that, and did keep some mannerisms of the previous generation.


Understanding is a three-edged sword.

My mom's taste in music stopped in the early 60's when she was a late teen. She's the same age as DeNiro.

Exactly. We have a tendency to look at one aspect of a decade and paint the entire decade with that brush.

Here's a clue for the OP:

50's - Not everybody was a greaser or a Beatnik
60's - Not everbody protested and went to Woodstock
70's - Not everybody was stoned
80's - Not everybody wore parachute pants and snorted coke
90's - Not everybody wore flannel and listened to grunge

If you think about it, the OP is actually arguing that they should have made the character more cliche by making him conform to the stereotype of what a young person in the 60s was like.

From the New Yorker review:

You’d think that Meyers, who has been in Hollywood long enough, would know better about stars of the golden seventies, whose character and styles were forged before the Age of Aquarius—and about the recklessly hedonistic fires with which they burned, and sometimes burned out. Women, too, often did the same. But what Jules needs—and what Meyers provides for her—is a man who, unthreateningly, unambiguously, unselfishly bears the wisdom of that experience without its guilt, who fought the wars not as they were on the ground but as they were depicted in the press releases—or in the movies—in the pre-Aquarian movies of unequivocal public virtue. Ben is a boomer in the garb of the Greatest Generation.