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After 2007’s Knocked Up, I was at least a bit excited for writer/director Judd Apatow’s future.  I thought he might have finally learned how to mold his power to pen raunchy comedies into the ability to integrate edgy humor with character driven stories.  Unfortunately, his latest movie, Funny People, seems to have pushed that threshold a bit too far.

Plunged into the incredibly convincing fallout of a commercially successful comedian’s career, we meet George Simmons (Adam Sandler), the rich bastard who just found out he’s dying.  Realizing that he’s driven away every human being in his life, he finds a rather pathetic standup comic, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), and for whatever reason, invites him to write for him, and to hopefully also become his friend.  Maybe this would be heartwarming were it in minimalist Kurosawa film from 1952, but unfortunately we’re stuck with the writer/director of The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Judd Apatow has attempted to make a meta-comedy.  This movie is not about laughing at raunchy witticisms; it is about what fuels people to make said quips.  While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but think of the 1981 Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories.  Both movies take what could be comically lucrative situations and ruin with them with lofty self-actualized humor.  Of course I’m not saying that comedians don’t deserve to be broken down, but the movies that do it best manage to maintain relatability within the lead character regardless of the humor or tragedy of any given situation.  Three superior films that play off similar themes are Lenny, Man on the Moon, and The Comic.  Where Dustin Hoffman, Jim Carrey, and Dick Van Dyke respectively succeed is in just how much they connected to the viewer.  You felt good when they felt good, and bad when they felt bad.  A simple moviemaking device, but nonetheless important to maintaining weight and investment in the story.  I’m well aware that where Funny People differs from these three movies in that the main character of the movie, Wright, isn’t said tragic comedian, but merely an impartial observer telling the story of the comic.  Regardless, in order to instead connect with this observer, motivations need to be clear.  In this movie a pathetic idiot befriends a despondent jerk, and then puts up with a lot of endless grief pursuing a lifestyle he is drawn to for no explainable reason.  Everything Wright envies about Simmons seems to be either completely superficial or completely vain.  This part of the story feels like a dumbed down, modernized version of La Dolce Vita, minus any carried out attempt at substance.

Eventually the movie stumbles into a more upbeat second act, where Simmons is meant to use all of the lessons he learned in his previous screen time.  Oddly enough though, he hasn’t learned a thing.  If anything, he has regressed to just the same old bastard he was, except now without any of the ridiculous moroseness.  What’s left is a poorly staged domestic drama where a tragic love triangle turns into a completely unmemorable exchange of by the book conflicted romance dialogue.  This whole sequence is so slight that I found myself beginning to doze at times fueled wholly by the ennui of this plodding and overplayed cliché.  Not until this second act does it really strike you just how bad Apatow is at writing/developing any women characters.  With the emergence of Laura (Leslie Mann) as Simmons’ love interest, it becomes even more obvious that you’re watching a movie with a predestined outcome.  Believability and fluidity of romance are destroyed when the audience can’t understand why a female character is considered at all desirable.  In this case, the fault belongs to both Apatow for inherently not understanding women, and Mann for playing her character with such convincing objectivity.

Over the course of this nearly 2 and a half hour movie, I witnessed at least a dozen people in the audience leaving.  Despite a plethora of shlong shtick, Funny People certainly doesn’t appeal to anyone looking for this year’s frat boy, gross-out comedy.  Unfortunately, Funny People also fails to be insightful enough to strike a chord with higher brow viewers, too.  When everything is said and done, all that’s really left is a pile of peters that failed at self-actualization.

-Paul Brinnel

I too fell myself starting to fall asleep during the last 2 hours of this movie. I didn’t know I had at the time, so all I was left to think was that there were massive plot holes and unestablished characters. Overall, a very accurate and well written review.I must ask you though, what is the significance and overall meaning of your last sentence?

Comment by Jillian 08.07.09 @ 5:26 pm