Knocked Up

Nobody’s posted on this one yet so I’ll give it a go. It is really hard to dislike this movie, though I did feel a bit let down after the comic delights of The 40 Year Old Virgin. The laughs are generous, the pacing a bit sluggish and the premise is ludicrous at best. Basically, a hot girl picks up a beta-male, they have sex, he repells her with his immaturity the following morning, and eight weeks later she discovers she’s pregnant. Fair enough; high concept. But then something odd happens. The script asks us to believe these two should automatically fall in love because there’s a baby on the way. Sure, you go to a rom-com for happy endings and without some conflict the climatic scenes lack proper generic decorum, but Knocked Up asks us to believe that two characters who have had one somewhat unfortunate evening and are about as compatible as cheese and chalk would be holding hands and picking out gynaecologists together as if that’s what happens. Basically, I wanted these two to fall for each other despite themselves (as if by accident after a series of carefully scripted scenes in which major obstacles and ah ha moments merge into something fresh and believable, love finds a way), and I guess that’s what the film thinks it’s doing but it is not. That being said, I would like to return to this idea of the film’s generosity.

This is an observation about comedy as a genre, which appears to be something more flexible and fluid than other genres. During the end credits, we get an extended series of photographs of parents and their children. It’s obvious that these are the real deal and I assume they are photographs of folks involved in the production. The film is about the joys of parenthood. It’s almost as if Judd Apatow and company are making a film in which they can share their love of family and children and marriage with the world. The dramatic narrative is simply a conduit to express something larger than the film itself and these end credits seem to mark that. The story, in other words, is not the story. If that makes sense. There is this sense of shared community at work in the film (it doesn’t hurt that Apatow has been working with the same group of actors for years). Apatow’s wife plays Paul Rudd’s wife in the film and their two kids are actually Apatow and Leslie Mann’s daughters (the film feels bloated because Apatow doesn’t seem to want to cut scenes in which people he loves and loves working with are having fun . . . hell, they have been posting outtakes of this film at YouTube and Funny or Die for weeks). I see this same kind of attitude in films by the Farrelly Brothers in which nearly every extra seems to belong to someone. The same goes for the folks who coalesce around Adam McKay and Will Farrell (who founded www.funnyordie.com in which McKay’s daughter plays the heavy in some mildly funny video shorts). Rudd, Rogen, Ben Stiller, the Wilson brothers, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Christina Applegate, Fred Armisen, John C. Reilly, etc., etc. I suppose someone can bring Bakhtin into this conversation, but the films these folks are working on seem to flow with collective glee–the cup is always running over and over. I’ll stop here cause I know a few of you (John and Reynolds) will have thoughts to share on the nature of comedy as social text. Anybody?