Work Out: THE BUBBLE and RIEN À FOUTRE

Wasn’t it stupid to try to make a big movie during a pandemic? So says Judd Apatow’s The Bubble, a big Netflix movie made during the pandemic. Aside from that central uneasy irony, the whole thing’s a bust. It’s a long, loosely-structured would-be comedy with really only the animating anxious confusion of life during COVID and free-floating anger at a flailing studio system hanging the shambles together. The picture takes place in a palatial hotel in the English countryside in the pre-vaccine phase of our current crisis. How strange to see that time so far in the rearview already, and yet still we muddle on. Nonetheless, it forces the fictional studio in this movie, in the midst of mounting the $100 million-budgeted production of the too-chintzy-to-believe Cliff Beasts 6, to lock its cast and crew in an isolation bubble. There’s a lot of wincing goofiness at the top as the cast assembles in masks for temperature tests, nasal swabs, and a two-week quarantine. And then they’re off, with sequences alternating between broad goofs on Hollywood egos and studio politics in front or behind the scenes, and even broader chafing against the COVID protocols on the other.

There’s much silliness made out of clashing actors—pompous leading men (David Duchovny), mumbling self-serious thespians (Pedro Pascal), ditzy leading ladies (Leslie Mann), lifestyle-brand floggers (Keegan-Michael Key), flailing aged ingenues (Karen Gillan), and a social media star (Iris Apatow). That last one has to be the funniest, with Apatow’s younger daughter nailing the spacey cadence and passionless dancing of a zoned-out TikTok influencer. (That her manager mom is played by the equally zonked-out, wide-eyed Maria Bamford makes perfect sense, and made me wish the she was in the movie more than her fleeting appearance. Maybe the whole movie should’ve just been about them? Hey, still could do a spin-off, right?) There’s also Fred Armisen as an indie director failing in a franchise, Peter Serafinowicz as the harried producer, Kate McKinnon as the heartless executive, and a host of other bit roles filled out by interesting or amusing presences like Maria Bakalova, Rob Delaney, and Daisy Ridley. Much is made out of safety zones, face shields, and positive tests, but just as much tepid farce about cooped up celebrities and harried crew members falling into hook ups and drug use and so on. Any sense of life outside this bubble fades fast, leaving the wasn’t-that-a-time material stale and distant and empty.

Apatow is always at his best with character portraits—Knocked Up, Trainwreck, The King of Staten Island—and less adept at the problems of the rich—This is 40. Yet strangely he’s done a great look at showbiz loneliness before in his best film—Funny People. Maybe it helped that it was set in the world of comedy, from stand-ups to writers to movie stars. He understood how to communicate the loneliness of life in this kind of success, and the yearning for a big break from those on the lower rungs. Here, in The Bubble, there’s no such understanding of how these enormous spectacles are actually made—scenes in the green screen spaces or with special effects handlers are weird guesstimates, scenes of the movies-within-the-movie don’t even rise to the level of convincing satire. and there are few attempts to make the characters people instead of caricatures. That leaves the movie with empty farce that does nothing but remind you that there’s still a novel virus tearing through our world and an unfunny movie about the problems of a bunch of fake people in rarified circumstances isn’t making the comments it thinks it is.

That’s not to say it’d be too early to make fun of Hollywood excesses against the backdrop of a global pandemic that’s still killing thousands a day. But the movie’s too scattershot to land its punches with any verve, and the screenplay is so dramatically inert and tepidly shot that it’s two pretty flat hours that crawl by. Besides, the characters are so excruciatingly thinly drawn that there’s nowhere for it to go, anyway. When the leading lady has her hand shot off by an overzealous security guard, well, I guess that’s just par for the course. There’s no sense of escalation to the silliness, so by the time we get there, it’s just one more thing. I don’t doubt Apatow’s genuine dissatisfaction with the soulless Hollywood machinery churning out stupider product in the midst of a fraught time. However, the movie isn’t built to bolster that claim, instead finding at most mild amusement as his cast of personalities bounce off of each other, and then frittering away any attempt to add it all up. This manages to make Apatow’s movie simultaneously a howl of frustration and a whine of privilege. The extent to which the movie’s aware of that fact is dialed up and down seemingly at random. How frustrating. It asks: how dare a studio give these people a lot of money to make something this stupid at a time like this? Ditto.

A new streaming movie that’s actually about what it feels like to work for a living these days is Belgium’s small, well-observed flight attendant drama, Rien à foutre, which can be translated as Zero Fucks Given. With a title like that, and the copious stories lately about belligerent passengers refusing to, say, wear a mask to prevent the spread of disease, you’d think the movie would be a wild, vulgar affair. Going in I was thinking it’d be something like Pedro Almodovar’s deliriously fizzy airplane comedy I’m So Excited by way of Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging’s pandemic satire. But the movie is actually a sensitive little character study about a lost young woman, adrift in the air and on the ground alike as she tries to make do. It’s mostly a pre-pandemic story—though everyone’s in masks in the final scene, a bittersweet way of marking time, to be sure. Its consistent mood of now-what? is spot on.

The focus is simply on sketching the contours of one woman’s life, and finds no build to any false conflict or cheap revelations. No Sundance sentiment or workplace sitcom here. There’s something real and lived-in at the center of the picture. The flight attendant works for a budget airline and is lost to a grinding routine—airports, drinks, clubs, and one-night stands, dating apps and Instagram. She’s making enough money to get by, and she dreams of someday getting better routes to more glamorous destinations, even as she smiles and sells drinks and manages passengers and tries to hit her quotas. She’s not unambitious, but she’s uninterested or unable to achieve liftoff. Even when her supervisor essentially forces her to apply for a promotion, she’s a little put off. She’s happy the way she is. Or, maybe not happy, but it’s what she knows. Even the corporate hoops are mere inconvenience, until they’re not. There are moments where her face fills the frame as a smile passes subtly, slowly from genuine to fake, and you feel her world shift underneath her.

Credit star Adèle Exarchopoulos, then, for keeping the movie aloft. Though filmmakers Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre, working from a screenplay they wrote in collaborations with Mariette Désert, bring a ring of specificity to attendants’ shifts and downtime alike, it’s the lead who lifts it to the level of engaging throughout. Fittingly, they keep the camera in tight close-ups and medium shots on her expressive face and body language, precise and casual, beautiful and troubled. Exarchopoulos, who made such a memorable presence as a hungry teenager in the lesbian coming-of-age drama Blue is the Warmest Color nearly a decade ago, here again makes a compelling center of attention. She appears to be good at her job—she listens, she’s polite, she endures demands and insults with some grace. But she also drinks—sometimes too close to flights—and has no interest in maintaining relationships. Friendships are restricted to her co-workers and seem to last just the duration of any given stay. Romances are ordered up on apps for a few hours at a time. Eventually, she ends up back home with some family for a while, and we get some added insight into reasons why she feels particularly at a loss to move on. There’s real sadness there. But also love.

And it’s not like she’s only miserable, exactly. Here’s a movie that understands the complicated feelings many young people have today about their work and their seemingly stalled pathways forward. She seems to get pleasures from her lifestyle, and can like her job from time to time, but there’s also that indescribable sense that there’s no clear way to get more out of it, or to escape these cycles. Exarchopoulos, enlivening a quiet charisma sinking under a facade of pleasantries or a layer of sleepy depression, knits these details together into one convincing portrait. By the end, she feels like a real person we’ve gotten to know, and the movie’s lack of resolution or even easy ambiguity feels like we’ve just left her, she and we still wondering what’s next. In a time when employees are looking for work to give them not only meaning and money, but dignity, too, here’s a movie about a woman slowly realizing she’s worth more than they, or she, might think.

Tragi-comic: THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND

Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island is another R-rated comedy about a man-child shuffling slowly toward self-improvement — but, true to Apatow at his best, it’s an affecting, funny one that rings with well-earned truth and sentiment. He knows what his imitators—so many we’re now well past the other side of the pale copies flooding theaters after his 2007 smash Knocked Up —have rarely been able to figure out. In order to make this plot work, we need duration and specificity, the stuff of James L. Brooks or Cameron Crowe or Mike Nichols when their dramedies are really cooking. Apatow can have that same sensitive touch, the confidence to let scenes and plot threads stretch out and amble along, and the wisdom to work closely with his actors to generate the kind of perfect hand-in-glove fit of role and performer. This new work is his best film since 2009's Funny People, that wise, bitter, rambling, melancholic movie that gave Adam Sandler his best role playing a big comedy star whose silly movies don’t quite feed his soul the way a happier life would. Now Staten Island takes Pete Davidson—the current SNL star whose painfully confessional "Weekend Update" standup bits are sometimes as awkwardly funny as his acting in the (admittedly often terribly written) sketches is occasionally cringeworthy—and makes with him his finest role.

The focus is on an emotionally stunted 24-year-old high-school dropout stoner whose deep discomfort with his own feelings and dizzyingly low self-esteem leads him into standoffish encounters with everyone he knows and loves. And those doesn't, too. He can’t handle change well, and therefore hopes by keeping his ambition low and resisting big life moments — relationships, graduations, moving out, getting work, seeing his family members grow — he’ll avoid that pain. When he was seven years old, his firefighter dad died on the job. Davidson vividly plays this pain behind the arrested adolescence; he’s prickly, sometimes slyly charming, often zoned out, but always fragile and clenched. Apatow, who co-wrote with Davidson and Dave Sirus, allows him to start in a truly dismal place, and lets the film stretch to over two hours, generously granting this troubled person the patience and space to slowly, painfully turn a corner in his life. That Davidson draws upon elements of his own life story to make up this character is surely part of what gives it the spark of realism to the character’s psychology, which in turn allows us to understand all the more acutely from where he’s coming. It’s no spoiler to say the young man’s life is not totally solved in the end. But we can hope it’s enough of a start that he’ll believe it. And because we spend so long with him and the cast of characters around him, we can start to believe it ourselves.

The movie has the typically Apatowian character-driven ear for long, semi-improvised scenes that build up rapport between characters, and the sweetness that cuts the vulgarity. Ostensibly a comedy, it’s perhaps the least interested in punchlines of any of his films. It’s funny in the way life is, accidentally in fumbling torrents of awkward tension, or sweetly in characters’ joshing connections, or in the absurdity of escalating bad decisions. It accommodates different moods, and approaches with tenderness its characters flaws. (There’s a sequence in a pharmacy at the midpoint that I saw as Apatow’s version of the Safdie brothers’ sense of bleakly comic anxiety in films like Uncut Gems and Good Time, but with a kinder view of his characters' fates.) The slowly developed throughlines involve Davidson’s character’s attempts to find a life he’ll be okay with living. An early moment in which he casually talks about killing himself is harrowingly believable. So his often inadvertent betterment process involves hanging with a posse of ne’er-do-well drug dealer friends (Ricky Velez, Lou Wilson, and Moises Arias), and a longtime girl friend (Bel Powley) he, much to her frustration, hesitates to make official. Even more fraught is his reaction to his family dynamics, as his younger sister (Maude Apatow) goes away to college, and his lonely mother (Marisa Tomei) finally starts dating again after 17 years of widowhood. The new man (Bill Burr) is also a fireman, a source of obvious tension for the young man who has yet to process his father’s death. Though he’s scarred over with hard edges and surly insults—not to mention the cavalcade of scribbled tattoos over his body— this death is still a raw emotional wound that bleeds easily with little prodding.

It’s the way Apatow and Davidson let the totally zonkered futility of his emotional state in the early passages play so unvarnished and uncomfortable, even in the context of a tone that accommodates bursts of laughs, that somehow can draw in a sympathetic audience even as his behavior clearly pushes people in his life away. His mother and sister worry about him, his mother’s new beau gingerly tests out possible avenues for bonding while trying to avoid getting hurt, or messing up his potential new relationship. Eventually, there’s room for growth, but the length of the film, and the willingness to let the plot wander, following characters not on one specific, over-determined arc, but on a winding path that maybe, just maybe bring them to slightly happier places, feel so full and finely observed. It doesn’t race to big gags or push hard to make recurring bits. It is light and weighty, an unhurried, confidently close film that builds to sentimental moments and earns them by playing them softly, and putting in the work building characters we can care about and believe in. It’s the sort of movie where we can start to anticipate—and dread—characters’ reactions to new variables, and can breathe a sigh of relief when they make a better choice, or smile as they find new comfort in a new task, an unexpected source of accomplishment and growth, or even just a late-night singalong where they all realize they don’t know the words but sing at the top of their lungs anyway. And isn’t that what making something of your life is all about?

Love and Other Drugs: TRAINWRECK

Trainwreck is a sweet and salty romantic comedy loaded down with endless digressions, smirking vulgarity, stand-up dressed up as dialogue, and sudden dips into sentimental drama. If you think that sounds like a Judd Apatow picture, you’re exactly right, all the way down to the over-two-hours runtime. But here he’s working from a screenplay by Amy Schumer, who also stars. She brings her sense of tart gender politics and sly observational ear, as showcased in her hit-and-miss sketch show on Comedy Central, folding them into a movie that’s both unmistakable from her voice, and undeniably part of the Apatow approach. It starts with liberal raunch, and ends with conservative coupling, locates what it judges immaturity in its main character and finds reason to induce what it thinks is emotional growth. But at least the movie, which could easily fit into his man-child comedies’ tropes, follows a woman, and commits to telling a story from her perspective.

Schumer stars as a reporter for a magazine living a fun New York City life with lots of alcohol, pot, and a revolving door of quick relationships and one-night stands. Side-stepping the usual rom-com setup, she’s not exactly looking to settle down. Her latest sort-of-boyfriend was a hulking muscle man (John Cena) she never quite liked. So she’s as surprised as anyone else when she might actually love a sports’ doctor (Bill Hader) her editor (Tilda Swinton) has assigned her to interview. The following story finds Schumer and Hader cautiously moving toward a relationship, having fun hanging out, and eventually hitting every girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy beat you’d expect. But the melding of Schumer and Apatow’s comedic sensibilities makes the resulting film feel loose and shapeless, so that the big moments take a long time coming and approach from different angles, moments somehow fresh despite so retrospectively obvious.

Apatow has certainly never been a filmmaker who cuts out lengthy riffs or dawdling detours. (When it works best, like in his Funny People, there’s a fine lived-in quality.) And Schumer has never been a writer particular interested in holding back frank talk. (Her best sketches have a precise ear for unspoken assumptions.) Together, they find a nice groove, an appealingly shaggy amusement that’s always going where you suspect it is, but unhurried about getting there. This accommodates all sorts of digressions in a textured approach to what other films would play for easy shock humor or manipulative sentiment (although there’s that, too). Though Schumer and Hader have a warm, relaxed chemistry, which sells their rom-com paces, the film’s length and pokiness allows for a wider understanding of her character. We get just as much time with sneakily moving, and frankly more interesting, prickly relationships with her sick father (Colin Quinn) and married sister (Brie Larson).

Could every single scene be shorter, and cut more tightly? Yes. But then the movie would lose some of the rambling quality that drifts it away from formula and into its characters lives. Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (HBO’s Girls) finds casual beauty to their New York existences, from spacious apartments to cramped subways, while the movie meanders along, exploring a deep bench of side characters, caricatures and cameos all. We meet a gaggle of magazine employees (Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Jon Glaser, and Ezra Miller), a senile elderly man (Norman Lloyd), a homeless guy (Dave Atell), suburbanites (including Mike Birbiglia, Tim Meadows, and Nikki Glaser), and LeBron James (as himself). They’re all mostly inessential to the overarching narrative (especially an even weirder batch of celebrity appearances near the end), but irreplaceable for the windows into Schumer and Hader’s lives outside the romantic comedy world in which they’re living.

Because this is a more expansive ramble than most comedies attempt, there’s small disappointment in finding it settle back into formulaic moments. But how often do you get to see a rom-com these days, especially one so intent on fully fleshing in its characters outside their interactions with each other? And rarer still are the movies told so persuasively from a woman’s point of view, placing an obvious and welcome focus on her pleasure, her opinions, and her complicated evolving decisions. (It also flips the usual romance gender dynamics, making her the commitment-phobe, and he the one ready to settle down.) There’s a sting of earnest truthfulness in Schumer’s framing of familial and romantic relationships, tired wisdom where people grow together or apart for understandable, relatable reasons instead of flailing sitcom misunderstanding. Here’s a movie broad enough to support goofy sex scenes and big silly behavior, while containing it within a believable emotional world. That it’s uneven comes with the territory.

Scenes from a Marriage: THIS IS 40

Audiences first met Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann) in Judd Apatow’s hit 2007 comedy Knocked Up. They were the harried couple in their mid-30s with two young kids, a family that was both a source of hope and a cautionary tale to the film’s leads, expectant parents played by Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. Pete and Debbie were in some ways the best parts of that movie, memorable and with some exaggerated truth about them. You might remember Pete warning, “Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond. Only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.” Now Apatow has plucked these characters from his earlier hit to create a spin-off with This is 40, a movie that proves Pete’s line about marriage correct. This is a sort of epic, R-rated sitcom episode, right down to the sunny bland visual sense, unfunny in large patches and lasting seemingly forever. It’s a shaggy, uneven film with some small, incidental pleasures that from time to time nearly make up for the production’s overarching solipsism.

The film takes place in the days before Pete and Debbie’s fortieth birthdays, a fine hook on which to hang a plot of personal reflection perched on the precipice of potential midlife crises exacerbated by pressures from outside the marriage. In true sitcom fashion, each half of this couple is hiding or minimizing important information from the other. Pete, when he’s not secretly scarfing cupcakes, has been giving money to his freeloading dad (Albert Brooks), which couldn’t be more inconvenient since his indie record label is on the brink of collapse and he’s missed a few mortgage payments. Debbie is also having trouble with her dad, an aloof, awkward, distant parent (John Lithgow), and money problems that need her to find out which one of her employees (either Megan Fox or Charlene Yi) is stealing from her boutique clothing store.

These are the main threads of anxiety that run through the picture, which are certainly fine impetuses for stress. It’s a shame that the film follows its characters right down a tunnel of self-absorption, with two characters locked in marital conflict in petty, grating ways. They bicker about diets, sex, childrearing, habits, money, vacations, and schedules. Over the course of 134 minutes, the film has plot elements that dead-end or take a cul-de-sac in a loose, rambling structure that allows foibles and miscommunications to escalate, pile up, fade away, come roaring back, shift priorities, and resolve, or not, in sometimes enjoyable fashion. Rudd and Mann are very good performers and are here, but the film is ultimately so repetitive an irritant, circling around the same emotional problems, relationship conflicts, and thematic concerns with increasingly less to say, that in the end I cared about the side characters far more than the couple at the center of it all.

Take, for example, the great Melissa McCarthy, an Oscar nominee last year for her work in the very good comedy Bridesmaids, who here plays a mom of one of Pete and Debbie’s daughter’s classmates. Following a terrible scene in which Debbie, thinking she’s sticking up for her daughter, cruelly berates the poor kid, the parents are called into the principal’s office. In a painfully uncomfortable scene, Debbie simply denies the encounter, which leads to McCarthy getting increasingly agitated. In the end, she’s the one who gets in trouble with the principal, coming across as a crazy person simply because Pete and Debbie present such a united front of deceit. (Well, McCarthy's character's a little crazy too, but still.) Beats me why we’re supposed to like this sort of thing. All this really did was cut off any lingering affection I had for the main characters.

Besides, all the stuff even approaching funny is happening with characters sitting on the sidelines with undernourished subplots, a fact that’s some sort of astonishing in a film this indulgent. For starters, there are Apatow’s daughters, Maude and Iris, playing Pete and Debbie’s daughters through convincing and cute character traits, the older newly adolescent and moody, the younger awfully precocious in a good way. I liked their relationship with each other as well, which leads to the film’s best off-handedly sweet moments. Brooks and Lithgow, as the flailing grandfathers, are fun as well, but never more than when they get a chance to play a scene opposite each other. Fox and Yi are amusing as two diametrically opposite employees, each quick to accuse the other of being the thief. Then there’s the terrific supporting cast filled with people like Chris O’Dowd, Jason Segel, and Lena Dunham, who have a handful of mildly funny lines, if that, each.

The determined self-centered absorption at the film’s center ends up dragging down all of its more admirable qualities, which are scattered about the film with no real central drive or organization. If we are to care about the couple at the middle of it all, it’s made all the more difficult by their selfishness wherein a great deal of their problems would disappear by simply speaking to one another honestly or thinking about the feelings and motivations of others. If we are not suppose to care about this couple, than the least the movie could do is offer up sharper character studies instead of unconvincing types stuck crosswise in three or four Idiot Plots at once. Perhaps Apatow really does believe that marriage is a tense, unfunny, formless, endless sitcom episode, but he didn’t have to go and make one, did he?

Something Blue: BRIDESMAIDS

While the plot is set in motion by the announcement of an upcoming wedding, Bridesmaids is anything but a typical wedding comedy. It focuses not on the couple – the groom, in fact, has barely a line of dialogue in the entire picture – but on female relationships instead. It’s directed by Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) and produced by Judd Apatow, but the true auteur here is Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote the film with her friend Annie Mumolo and stars as the maid of honor. This is a sometimes very crude R-rated film in which women are allowed to be raunchy and rowdy, to be both beautiful and silly, even in the same instant. It’s a broad comedy with nicely observed friendships and competitions between these recognizably human characters.

In the film, Wiig plays a woman whose longtime best friend (Maya Rudolph) is happily ready to be married. But, unfortunately, Wiig’s life happens to be falling apart. Closer to 40 than 30, she has a failed business, a dead-end physical relationship with an emotionally distant jerk (Jon Hamm), and two deeply strange roommates (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas) who would very much like it if she could either pay the rent or move out. Her mom (the late Jill Clayburgh in her final role) isn’t much help. That last thing Wiig wants to do is move back in with her mother, but that seems to be an increasingly necessary option.

She clings to her relationship with her soon-to-be-married friend, even as it picks up a slight strain under the pressure of the impending ceremony. Weddings can be expensive and are full of situations ripe with the potential for massive social embarrassment. Wiig plays a woman completely unprepared for this stress, especially with the added strain that comes in the form of Rudolph’s new friend (Rose Byrne), a wealthy, glamorous lady for whom party planning and social graces seem to come naturally. It’s clear from the moment that their characters first meet that Wiig and Byrne are on a collision course.

The film walks through the various events leading up to the big day, from an engagement party to dress fittings, the bachelorette party and a wedding shower. At every turn, events get weird. Propriety breaks down. Strange faux pas pop up. Feelings get hurt. Along for the ride are the rest of the bridesmaids, a naïve newlywed (Ellie Kemper) thoroughly dazzled by the concept of a wedding, a weary mother (Wendi McLendon-Covey) who evokes the state of her chaotic household by mentioning that the other day she broke a blanket in half, and a jolly goofball (Melissa McCarthy) who seems to grow ever more cheerfully strange with each passing scene.

This is a comedy with several great scenes, the kind of hilarious moments that provoke squirm-in-the-seat, tears-down-the-face, jagged-breathing laughter. There’s an engagement party toast that becomes a slow build of increasing hilarity, as it becomes an elaborate game of one-upmanship between Wiig and Byrne. There’s a pristine, glowing, high-end dress shop which is the perfect setting for a sequence of unbelievably, hilariously gross mass gastrointestinal crisis (“I need to get off this white carpet!”). There’s a flight to a bachelorette party destination that becomes the perfect enclosed space for a jittery flyer to devolve into crazier and loopier goofiness. These sequences start small and are allowed to build momentum until part of the humor is that the embarrassment is still going on.

Through all of these moments, the very funny cast of scene-stealers keeps stealing scenes out from under each other, but Wiig looms large above them all. She has a rubbery elasticity, not just to her face and physicality, but to her emotional state as well. She’s a normal person with a life that’s falling apart, being slowly driven insane by extra pressures of social situations going horribly awry. It’s very comical, but what makes it all the more funny is that it’s built upon believable character relationships. Wiig and Rudolph have an unforced naturalness that seems to spring from a real, deep friendship. Wiig and Byrne clash in ways that feel specifically truthful in the passive-aggressive ways they play out. (There’s even a sweet romance between Wiig and a lovely cop played by Chris O’Dowd that is surprising in both its effectiveness and its relative lack of screen time).

Unlike terrible recent wedding-themed comedies that are, at least partially, about female friendships, like Bride Wars, which plays like some man’s awfully reductive and retrograde concept of how women relate to one another, Bridesmaids is a comedy by women and benefits from the sparks of truth that drive the story. It’s a bit long, sometimes uneven, but it more than makes up for it by laying out convincing groundwork for sequences of high flying vulgarity that occasionally turns into complete and total comic pleasure.

Funny People (2009)

With Funny People, his third film as director, Judd Apatow, the most prolific peddler of the modern R-rated comedy, has brought more ambition and less restraint, creating the type of generously textured, yet also turbulently messy, film that is precisely the type of film that deserves to be debated. It vibrates with a sense of vitality that at times makes up for the flaws. This isn’t exactly a masterpiece – I don’t like it quite enough to make that claim – but it’s the kind of interestingly tangled work – at once confidently controlled and dangerously personal – that a filmmaker can sometimes create that will inspire passionate, and justified, feelings both against and in defense. I will defend the film, for despite the genital-centered jokes that appear with inordinate frequency, as is the Apatow standard, this is a subtle and adult work, delving headfirst into tricky themes and remaining mostly unscathed.

The film stars Adam Sandler, in an oddly self-reflexive role, as successful comedian George Simmons, who has long since graduated from stand-up to land in the big-bucks studio comedies of precisely the kind in which Sandler has been known to appear. He’s the classic case of a man with everything he ever wanted, yet nothing that truly matters. As the film opens, we follow Simmons as he walks through a public space, stopping to take pictures or sign autographs for adoring fans. We end up with him in an examining room where he is told that he has a rare form of leukemia and only an eight-percent chance of surviving. We then follow him back into the world fully expecting, having been conditioned by countless disease-of-the-week dramas, for Simmons to grow and change, learning life lessons while battling the disease. This doesn’t happen, or at least, not exactly.

This is where we meet Ira Wright, a struggling stand-up comedian played by Seth Rogen. He lives with roommates, also comedians, one (Jonah Hill) his colleague in the amateur stand-up world, the other (Jason Schwartzman) relishing his glimmer of success with a mildly successful, if mostly derided, NBC sitcom. It is at the improv where George sees Ira’s act and later calls him and offers him a job as a joke writer. The film then follows George and Ira through an odd relationship, positioned somewhere between personal and professional, with interesting emotional pushes and pulls, naturally arising conflicts with uneasy resolutions. Apatow is unafraid to follow his characters down tangents in plot while in pursuit of emotional truth. In fact, the whole third act of the film could be considered a tangent, dealing with characters who, by that point, have been unseen (Eric Bana) or half-glimpsed (Apatow’s loveably cute daughters) and foregrounding a romance subplot involving Leslie Mann that is arguably unnecessary, but I went with it.

The movie is lumpy and misshapen, I won’t argue that point, but it rarely feels like it steps wrong. Even distracting cameos from real-world celebrities are easily ignored in the flow of the feelings the film evokes, in the rich texture of supporting roles like Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, and RZA who, though given few scenes, create fully realized characters that weave in to the greater tapestry. The film is not about plot. Instead, this is a film about character and emotion, tone and mood. Apatow, working with the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has crafted a movie with understated beauty in the images and rhythm. How often can that be said about a big studio summer comedy? This isn’t just a comedy, but it’s also unfair to label it a dramedy, as some are quick to do. This is a drama, pure and simple. The characters happen to be quick-witted individuals who crack jokes as a default when dealing with any situation. These are funny people, no doubt about it, but they are living the same dramatic lives as any other set of people. Since Apatow started as a stand-up before becoming the success that he is now, it seems that Apatow sees himself in his two leads: Ira is who he was; George is who he all too easily could have become.

This is a film, in ways both subtle and sweet, about lives in transition. The arcs the characters travel never feel predetermined, they never creak with convention. Everyone knows by now that comedians are rarely the happiest members of humanity, and Apatow wisely avoids making this the theme of his film. Nor does he merely use the central question of disease and mortality to show us once again how confronting the abyss of death can cause radical change within an individual. With Funny People, Apatow isn’t content to restate. He’s interested in exploring the trickier, subtler terrain where people change in small, not big, ways. In doing so, though this is far from a perfect film, it casts a spell that only messy, tricky, passionately personal films can.