Judd Apatow’s real topic this time around s family life – its joys, its frustrations, and he way it forces grown-ups to act their age, even in our youth-addled culture.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
As most of America probably knows by now, Knocked Up writer-director Judd Apatow is the living embodiment of the revenge of the nerds. In movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman and in the TV cult hit Freaks and Geeks, the self-described "nerdy guy" hit the Hollywood jackpot by letting his geek flag fly.
He starts by whipping up a silly soufflé of a plot, just unlikely enough to generate some solid belly laughs, then studs it with intensely concentrated little nuggets of truth. Centering it all is a kind of holy innocent, a nerd so sweetly sincere that you root for him to make it in spite of himself. But none of that would work if Apatow didn’t have a gift for riffing on universal human emotions, an appreciation for the sweet absurdity of life, and a gleeful sense of humor.
As played by the appealing Seth Rogen, a round-eyed, prematurely potbellied innocent with a cherub’s baby face and curly hair and the quirkily querulous delivery of a young Albert Brooks, Ben Stone of Knocked Up is the ultimate Apatow underdog. Dragging his adolescence with him well into his 30s, Ben spends all his time hanging out with his equally unprepossessing best friends, getting high, trading artfully crafted insults, and cataloguing nude scenes in mainstream movies for a Web site they plan to launch… as soon as they can figure out how.
We can’t help but love the good-tempered galoot, but when he winds up in bed with the beautiful and accomplished Alison (Katherine Heigl) at the end of a drunken night out at a bar, his delighted disbelief seems entirely appropriate. After all, she’s a grown woman with a real job and a sense of purpose. As Ben and Alison struggle to make conversation over breakfast the next day, they might as well be from different generations.
The scene is painfully funny because it’s realistic, and so is what follows: Alison gives Ben a wrong number on purpose, and their relationship ends with that one-night stand. Or it would, except that Alison gets pregnant. Deciding to give her baby-daddy a second chance, she gets back in touch with Ben and the two embark on an unlikely courtship. Nerd gets girl, nerd loses girl, and nerd wins girl in this belated-coming-of-age story, which may, as The New York Times put it, "take its celebration of American schlubitude (loserdom? schlemieliness?) to a new level."
As usual, Apatow also has fun with popular culture, pulling the curtain back from Alison’s work life as a producer of a glossy TV entertainment news show to give us a glimpse of the back-stabbing and schadenfreude backstage. But his real topic this time around is family life its joys, its frustrations, and the way it forces grown-ups to act their age, even in our youth-addled culture.
Alison lives with her sister, Debbie (played by Apatow’s wife, the refreshingly tart Leslie Mann), her husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and their two deceptively sweet-faced young daughters (played by Apatow’s and Mann’s own girls). That family’s domestic life forms the backdrop for Alison and Ben’s story, whether it’s Debbie turning down Pete’s offer of sex because she’s feeling constipated or Pete watching his girls play and wistfully observing: "I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles."
There’s also a lot of funny boyische banter, first between Ben and his group of friends and then, as he spends more time with Alison and falls for Pete almost as hard as he did for her, between Ben and Pete.
One trait the two have in common is that, like all Apatow heroes, they truly respect and appreciate women in fact, they’re a bit in awe of them. Even the acid-tongued, combative Debbie, the kind of woman who would be cruelly caricatured in most movies, is revered in this one, recognized as the good woman and good catch that she is. Better yet, she’s given some of the funniest lines, especially in a classic confrontation with a doorman at an exclusive nightclub.
Unfortunately, Heigl can’t match the force of Mann’s personality. She’s plenty pretty enough, but she’s not a very strong actress or screen presence, and she pales all the more next to her co-stars. But this is really Ben’s story, and Rogen claims it with humor and grace.
With any luck, this should be a breakout year for the everyman actor, who has already shot four more movies that are due to be released this year or next. He’s also voicing a part in another animated movie (he was the ship’s captain in Shrek the Third) and no wonder. After all, judging by the success of Apatow’s movies, it’s the Year of the Nerd.
Rated R for sexual content, drug use and language. 129 minutes.