Three stars. Rating: R, for relentless crude humor, sexual candor, pervasive language and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.21.12
Some perceptive truths about
marriage, mid-life crises and parental angst linger around the edges of This
Is 40, but they tend to be overshadowed by Judd Apatow’s reflexive insistence
on vulgar humor, crude slapstick and bewildering plot detours. Obviously, he
just can’t help himself.
Nor should he, I suppose, since
many of his films — either as producer, director or writer — tend to be
crowd-pleasers. But we must remember that his lengthy 21st century résumé reads
very much like the gag quotient in any one of his projects: Every Bridesmaids or Superbad follows on the heels of a bomb such as Drillbit Taylor, Funny People or Get Him to the Greek ... just as the truly funny bits in This Is
40 are bookended by stuff so forced and ill-advised that we can’t help
wondering what Apatow was smoking that day.
Maybe that’s why This Is 40 runs a ridiculously self-indulgent 134 minutes. With that much time on his
side, and that many comedic shots in the barrel, some of the humor is bound to stick.
Although Apatow oversees a busy
comedy empire, This Is 40 is only his fourth feature as director, following The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and the tediously morose Funny People. This new film, something of a peripheral sequel to Knocked Up, focuses on the
five-years-later lives of Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann), that
film’s sidebar characters.
Except that Katherine Heigl, who
played Debbie’s sister Alison in Knocked Up, is nowhere to be seen here.
Apparently she got lost in translation.
As this new film’s title
suggests, events center around the ramp-up to Pete’s impending 40th birthday. He’d
normally share this milestone with Debbie, but a refusal to face the onset of
middle age has prompted her to deny her own birthday; indeed, she even rolls
back the clock and claims a younger age, a running gag that becomes truly
hilarious during a routine doctor’s office visit, when various nurses and
receptionists try to nail down her birth year.
That scene works, by the way,
because Apatow goes for subtle underplaying, rather than his usual,
last-row-of-the-upper-balcony broad strokes.
Age-related angst aside, Pete and
Debbie aren’t in a terribly happy place for several reasons, starting with
financial troubles. Pete’s indie record label is hemorrhaging money because he
insists on representing aging “classic rockers” who have no relevance to modern
music fans. (In a nice nod to the real world, venerable British
singer/songwriter Graham Parker plays himself and delivers several songs in
various scenes.)
Debbie’s boutique clothing shop is
short $12,000 that seems to have been skimmed by one of her two employees:
knock-out sex bomb Desi (Megan Fox) or mousy Jodi (Charlyne Yi). Pete further exacerbates
the cash-flow situation by continually loaning money to his mooch of a father,
Larry (Albert Brooks, overplaying his patented Jewish shtick).
Plenty of money, as it turns out,
and this financial issue eventually becomes quite distracting. Even without the
80 grand shoveled in Larry’s direction during the past few years, I cannot
imagine how the income from two small, struggling businesses could produce the
ridiculously opulent lifestyle that Pete and Debbie enjoy with their spoiled
and over-privileged daughters, Sadie (Maude Apatow) and Charlotte (Iris
Apatow). Their house alone is humongous, and stocked with every possible
high-tech toy; Pete’s party, when it finally arrives, looks like something
catered at a Beverly Hills country club.
I realize we Americans have grown
accustomed to living way beyond our over-leveraged means, but this is absurd.
And since Apatow never really addresses financial stupidity in his script, it’s
not as if he’s taking any perceptive jabs at incompetent over-consumption.
But I digress.
Both Pete and Debbie have grown
insecure about their bodies, and their sex lives, and their desperate search
for “alone time.” (Pete’s solution to the latter will be recognized by every
guy in the theater.) Their alternately frustrated and panicked reactions to
these various traumas, large and small, are spot-on; fortysomething (and older)
viewers will roar with pained recognition, while their kids — who shouldn’t be
watching this tawdry movie in the first place, but I know better — will wince
and say “Ewwwww” a lot. (Too much parental information.)
Indeed, all details relating to
this age crisis, and the myriad ways our bodies begin to betray us, are by far
the best part of This Is 40. Apatow has a rare gift for drawing humor, often
ribald humor, from our everyday anxieties: both the minor ones that we attempt
to joke about in public, and the private ones that we don’t even like to share
with our partners.
I’ll even grant Apatow a solid
understanding of a typical family generation gap, and the tension created by an
elder daughter entering her teen years, and no longer wanting anything to do
with her younger sister. Apatow should know; they are his daughters (and Mann
is his wife/their mother). Granted, Maude Apatow’s Sadie overplays the shrill
bee-yatch card, but she has cause, having to endure such lunatic parents.
Iris Apatow’s Charlotte, in
welcome contrast, delivers a far more natural and authentic performance as the
sweeter younger child, prone to perceptive and quite telling comments.
Too many other stray issues,
however, seem shoe-horned into the script solely to give various supporting
characters and guest stars something to do. Melissa McCarthy, so funny in Bridesmaids, struggles gamely but can’t leverage her hopeless cameo as the
obnoxious parent of a boy who runs afoul of Debbie after leaving nasty messages
on Sadie’s Facebook page. Daft as this scene is, however, it’s nothing compared
to the weird place Yi’s Jodi eventually wanders, during a confrontation with
Debbie.
A sequence involving Pete’s
belittling behavior with a practitioner of Eastern medicine (Sam Dissanayake),
when Charlotte is sidelined by an ear infection, is simply beyond the pale and
painfully unfunny. Why is it in the movie?
And while we might have been
amused to discover that either Pete or Debbie’s father is preoccupied by
next-gen families with younger wives, playing this card with both Larry and
Debbie’s estranged father, Oliver (John Lithgow), is just silly. Indeed, poor
Lithgow hasn’t the faintest idea how to handle his part, and no wonder; Apatow
doesn’t even try to justify the reasons for Oliver’s hands-off approach toward
Debbie. It’s just another inexplicable left-field detail like the size of Pete
and Debbie’s house.
Then, too, Apatow often can’t
resist a tendency to milk a gag past the point of genuine humor. It’s quite
funny when Debbie, envious of Desi’s absolutely perfect breasts, accepts the
younger woman’s offer to feel them. Initially funny, that is; the scene’s humor
begins to leak away as Debbie keeps kneading and prodding.
But, then, that’s Apatow’s
long-established formula: If something is funny for two or three seconds, then
it must be even funnier when stretched to 20 seconds. Or more.
Sadly ... no.
It must be noted, however, that
Fox finally has found a role perfectly suited to her limited thespic talents.
Sadly, she really is little more than her bodacious bod, and the character of
Desi is carefully tailored to Fox’s modest acting range.
The always engaging Chris O’Dowd
shines as Ronnie, one of Pete’s record label colleagues. O’Dowd’s best moment
comes when he and Jason Segel, also droll as Debbie’s physical trainer, wind up
vying for Desi’s attentions in a swimming pool.
Lena Dunham, currently a hot
commodity on HBO’s Girls, pops up as Pete’s other record label employee; Tatum
O’Neal lends her voice as a Realtor during a phone call with Pete, but I doubt
you’d recognize her without being told. But you will recognize Green Day’s
Billie Joe Armstrong, as an appreciate fan during one of Graham Parker’s club
gigs.
The lion’s share of screen time,
however, belongs to Rudd and Mann. She does a far better job of keeping Debbie
more or less grounded and genuine; her various mood swings — and some of them
are pretty wild — never completely bury Mann’s core vulnerability. For the most
part, Debbie deserves our support and empathy.
Not so Rudd, who channels yet
another of his cranky, condescending, self-involved jerks. At a crisis point, after
we’ve spent close to two hours with this couple, Debbie wonders whether they’d
even be together today, had she not gotten pregnant with their first daughter.
Pete is stuck for an answer, and that moment feels right; why would she
continue to put up with him?
That awkward, devastating pause
carries far more truth than the film’s obligatory final scene, which leaves us
feeling that nothing has been resolved. That may accurately reflect the
real-world squabbles of mismatched couples, but it’s not terribly satisfying.
As is the case, ultimately, with
much of this film.
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