Funny People
Maxabout Review
Muddled, Overly ambitious and Frustratingly Overlong.. .
Friday, July 31, 2009
Odd existential grossout in odd couple collision with dysfunctional family values, tiresome male organ transplant yucks to the big screen, and a few zany infatuations of the fanboy and buddy bonding kind.
Not exactly a movie about dying of laughter but close to it,
Judd Apatow's pot luck mock morbid meditation on mortality, punchlines and male anatomy, is strangely as much about the cutting off of life as castration anxiety issues. But writer/director Apatow's playful hide and seek scenario may finally be more about how the joke is on us.
Having played around in the raunch comedy sandbox for several years now, bringing us genuine gems 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up and producing smaller wonders like Superbad, Apatow decided to put on his grown-up pants for his third feature, tackling a story about growing old, cancer, parenthood, failure, and selling out. To do it he's enlisted old friend Adam Sandler, a comedian who's already proven capable of digging deep and providing the dramatic goods.
It's not that Apatow made the dramatic leap too soon, since much of Funny People's pathos and heartfelt drama works well. But the indulgence he has always shown his actors, letting scenes run overlong and keeping in extra shots of his cute kids, cripples the movie, which meanders around three or four plots and comes to as many conclusions about Life with a Capital L before ending seemingly at random, aware it has exhausted its audience's indulgence for the guy we used to rely on to make us laugh.
Not that Funny People doesn't work on a comedic level too, riffing on big-
budget Hollywood comedy and stand-up tropes to create the world in which George Simmons (Sandler) is a famous comedian, having long ago sacrificed his edge for high-concept crap like Mer-Man and Re-Do. George's movies are parodies, but they also go beyond the easy laugh, and it's clear that Sandler is having a little fun at his own career's expense. Unlike the married Sandler, though, George is a lonely rich man who's also dying, as he finds out in the film's first scene, from some vaguely defined blood cancer.
The film develops nicely as George, in some kind of cry for help, takes the stage at a comedy club and bombs, but also notices struggling young stand-up Ira (Seth Rogen), whom he hires to write jokes for corporate gigs like a MySpace retreat. George isn't exactly an unwilling mentor-- clearly he's brought the kid into his life to teach him a thing or two-- but he's not a very good one either; it's been a long time since George really tried to connect to another human, and he's out of practice.
Ira's life soon becomes fully enmeshed in George's, mostly because he didn't have that much going for him to begin with. One roommate (Jason Schwartzman) has a role on a terrible Saturday morning sitcom that's made him slightly rich, and the other is the basic Jonah Hill schlub character without much to add to the conversation. There's a cute stand-up (Aubrey Plaza) who lives across the hall, but Ira is so neurotic that he pushes her away as she gets closer.
Eventually Ira convinces George it's worth telling people important to him that he's dying, so George gathers the likes of Paul Reiser and, somehow, Eminem, as well as the girl that got away (Leslie Mann), a former actress now living with a buff Australian husband (Eric Bana) and two adorable daughters (Apatow and Mann's own, Maude and Iris Apatow) in northern California. George and Laura's connection is palpable, old hurts quickly forgotten, and George knows quite well that she never would have come back into his life if it weren't for his imminent death.
And then it, as it turns out, George isn't dying after all. And then he cooks up a harebrained, hugely selfish scheme to win Laura back, which begins the story that the movie should have followed to begin with. The last hour of the film takes place at Laura's house in the Bay Area, as George thinks he's won her back and Ira looks on in horror, and it's an effective sequence. Unfortunately it has little to do with what we've seen in the first half of the film, with stand-up or all the celebrity cameos, and has nothing to do with Ira's story at all. The idea seems to be that Funny People is a two-hander between George and Ira, but much as George's life consumes Ira's, his story overwhelms the film. It's unclear why we watch the entirety of a video of Maude Apatow singing "Memory" from Cats, while Ira's romantic entanglement is concluded in a 30-second toss-off scene.
The funny parts, of which there are many, and the successfully dramatic ones too are wasted, as Apatow is unable to trim his story enough to give it a coherent purpose. The best we can hope for is that Funny People is a necessary middle ground between Apatow's adolescent experiment and the more adult stories he has yet to tell.
"Funny People" will make you angry. It's devoid of the heart it so desperately wants to prove it's got. Here Apatow's characteristic brand of raunch-sweetened-with-heart comedy devolves into crude, malicious schlock. And we've seen everything here before and done much better: Adam Sandler trying to prove his dramatic muscle, Seth Rogen as hapless eyewitness to a band of juveniles posing as adults, loving close-ups of Leslie Mann and her daughters, semi-autobiographical details of Apatow's career in comedy.
Funny People will be a failure, but at least a noble one.