A cardboard theater standee for Funny People in which its unsmiling cast poses in front of mosaic-of-life
snapshots above the text “The Third Film From the Writer/Director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up” tempts one to turn and flee
this Very Important Movie from reigning cinematic comedy kingpin Judd Apatow. And
true to its advertising, Apatow’s third turn behind the camera takes itself far
more seriously than its predecessors, striving for deep, mature commentary on
life, comedy and its practitioners amidst an avalanche of the director’s
trademark cock-and-balls jokes. Nonetheless, this step toward grown-up seriousness
isn’t, it turns out, a wholly misguided one, at least up until a bloated third
act whose indulgent aimlessness is the direct result of Apatow searching, in
vain, for a way to profoundly comment on mortality, the fleeting nature of opportunities,
and the excitement and loneliness of a showbiz life.
Funny People stars
Adam Sandler as film comedian George Simmons, a prick who’s made a mint
starring in crap and now lives a miserable life in his Hollywood mansion
screwing beauties who don’t like him and pitifully searching for human contact
via chitchat with the maid. George is a fictional take on the real Sandler as
well as an apparent vision of what Apatow fears he’ll become, a future-self juxtaposed
by the past-self embodied by Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright, an up-and-coming stand-up
comic to whom George, after learning that he’s terminally ill, takes a shine. George’s
ominous blood disease leads him toward introspection and reconciliation,
primarily with Laura (Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann), aka the love who got away, a self-reflective
journey of reckoning with personal failures that’s complemented by bits
involving Ira and his pals (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman) that play like a
more muted, industry-centric version of the guys-guys sequences from Knocked Up.
One-liners are delivered with a tentative hesitancy that
makes manifest the thin line between humor and the anger, sadness and regret
that fuel it. And Apatow’s humanist dramedy and both-sides-of-the-coin celeb
life portrait often makes up for its shakiness with blunt sincerity and lead
performances that, modeled in part after the actors’ own careers, cut
reasonably close to the bone. But then, a prolonged visit by George and Ira to married-with-kids
Laura’s home hurls the film into a tailspin from which recovery is next to impossible.
This distended sequence may be the writer/director’s rebuke to traditional
comedic pacing and clichés (the latter via its inversion of the classic
race-to-the-airport climax). Yet in its home stretch, Funny People’s action drags so unnecessarily that it not only
drains any impact from its refreshingly pragmatic view of second chances and one’s
ability to truly change, but inadvertently eats up time that would have been better
allocated to its thoroughly shortchanged conclusion.
One response to “Funny People (2009): C+”
Although you seem to have come to viewing the film with a cynical, wanting-to-dislike-it view, I do agree with most of what you say. The way it dragged on and eventually ended was deeply disappointing, having been so good for most of it.