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?

Did You Miss Me While Looking for Yourself Out There?OTHER PEOPLE

David (Jesse Plemons) is having a rough year. He’s a comedy writer pushing 30 whose pilot wasn’t picked up. His boyfriend just dumped him. And now he’s moving home with his parents, to help take care of his mother (Molly Shannon) while she dies of cancer. These are setbacks that are supposed to befall other people, he confides in an old classmate who tells him, “Now you’re other people for other people.” It’s with this dazed adrift quality that David goes through the next several months, struggling to spend as much time with his mother as he can while figuring out a way to get his life back on track. Writer-director Chris Kelly, veteran of Saturday Night Live and Broad City, brings to Other People, his debut feature, a sharp sense of timing, stringing together incidents by turns lightly comic, gallows humor dark, and gravely serious. It’s funny, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, sometimes turning one to the other in an instant. Throughout David’s aimless frustrations, and the problems of a family facing the end of a love one, help anchor every moment with humane specificity. It’s cozy as a high-quality serious-minded sitcom, and as sharp as a frank, well-observed, deeply personal story.

This isn’t a cancer movie with cancer as its main interest, or a movie about a young gay man that takes his sexuality as its only characterization. It’s not hard to imagine a terrible version of this story playing out like a cloying, manipulative message movie. How wonderful, then, to find instead a movie sincerely felt and earnestly expressed. Questions of illness and identity are elements used to bring specificity to the character’s lives, considered as part of a whole. The movie is simply about people living their lives in all facets and all quotidian ups and downs, doing the best they can with what they’re given. Here’s a full, warm-hearted, clear-eyed, and compassionate movie about a young man preparing to lose his mother. And yet he feels lost in so many ways, futilely pecking away at spec scripts, ignoring his younger sisters (Maude Apatow and Madisen Beaty) and their emotional needs, maintaining tenuous connections with his ex (Zach Woods), and struggling with seeking the approval of his conservative father (Bradley Whitford), who ten years after his son’s coming out is still unwilling to discuss it.

As much a portrait of millennial quarter-life crisis and modern family dysfunction as it is a movie about losing a loved one, Kelly wisely situates David at a nexus of confusion. His dream career seems out of reach. He’s frustrated about moving back to his hometown. He’s suspicious of dating apps, but increasingly tired of the isolation of his location, and perceived failures. Even his one hookup is clumsy. He splits his time between hanging out with his old friend (John Early) and fulfilling his sense of duty to his mother. He holds her hair while she vomits from chemo, watches her sing in the church choir until she can’t anymore, goes for walks in the park, and sits and talks with her while she nods in and out of sleep. He’s looking for some revelation about life, but instead settles into the long, slow, painful rhythms of watching his mother fade away. Kelly has the scenario progress at an unhurried pace, moving from month to month, picking out illuminating scenarios – a last family trip; discussion of a living will and burial plans; bad dates; professional setbacks; a meltdown in a grocery store’s pharmacy section as the full implications finally hit in waves of confusion – knowing that though a mother is dying, the family’s life still must move on.

This all could be the stuff of Sundance-darling indie-film cliché, the journey of self-discovery through small-town shenanigans and/or fatal diagnoses. But what saves Other People and, indeed, makes it great is Kelly’s good sense of authentic detail, honest messiness, and a ring of truth. I liked its vision of suburban California as an endless horizon of subdivisions, strip malls, and chain stores haunted by the local FM station’s repetitive loop of “Drops of Jupiter.” You can see why this place seems so much smaller than David’s showbiz aspirations. And I loved the family interactions, which aren’t so much melodrama or real tragedy as simple disagreements, sublimated emotional expressions, and subtle miscommunications. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy told us. This one is strained, but the love shows, too. (It’s especially fun and poignant when the grandparents (Paul Dooley and June Squibb) show up with sweet elderly candor laced with the sadness of a couple losing their daughter.) Then there are the awkward encounters, like distant acquaintances who don’t know the news and approach with cheer, or the caring friends who don’t quite know the words to express the sadness and shock they feel.

So expertly judged, Kelly use each moment as evocative glimpses into a variety of evolving reactions to the mournful central issue as well as the daily grind of everything else, even as the end draws near. Simply framed crisp clear digital photography captures scenes with no fuss, effectively and efficiently. This allows us to focus on the great, natural, emotionally dexterous acting and deeply felt dynamics at play. The entire ensemble (enjoyable and moving every one) brings tremendous and true lived-in performances, but I must single out the leads for special mention. Plemons plays David as a man unsure of his movements, hesitant about when to open up and when to merely be strong and silent. He wants his mother’s final months to be happy, and doesn’t want to trouble her with his career and relationship worries. He wants to care for her. Shannon plays her with a fading light, bubbly and funny and full of personality that slowly drains, until she speaks in a whisper as she says her goodbyes, mothering to the end. Their final scene together is the culmination of their characters’ searches for the right words that’ll make them feel some form of solace, as well as the sort of goodbye people have when they can’t bring themselves to say it’s the last one.

Because the movie is so compassionate to every person, and completely aware of how funny life can be even, and maybe especially, during trying and difficult times, there’s a sense of well-rounded believability that serves to make the movie more effective than one of non-stop single-minded sadness. Without falling back on cheap sentimentality or easy tear-jerking, the movie’s final moments earn a wallop of an ending, a satisfying conclusion that’s not tidy, but tender, convincing, right, and overwhelmingly moving. The first line of “Drops of Jupiter” – played earlier for laughs of recognition, now having become unexpectedly melancholy – started me crying. Then a shot of eyes, imbued with such casually forceful symbolic import, immediately before the final cut to black insured I’d be sniffling through the entire end credits, with the feeling I’d just seen something powerfully relatable and genuine.

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?