Judd Apatow is a valuable new voice in movie comedy. He’s also a long-winded new voice in movie comedy — his signature films, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and now Knocked Up, share not only an unexpected sweetness, an alarmingly tolerant understanding of the slacker lifestyle, and bracingly frank titles, but also the fact that they are each half an hour too long. Knocked Up (which natters on for 132 minutes) is surprisingly charming, but after a while you feel like the host of a dying party waiting for the guests to go home.
Knocked Up is something of a sequel to the first movie: it stars Seth Rogen, who played one of the fast-talking employees in the electronics store who helped Steve Carrell come to terms with his inner desires. In Knocked Up, he’s Ben Stone, essentially the same character except with even less of a work ethic. Ben lives with a group of friends who smoke pot all day — sometimes wearing gas masks — and are assembling a website that lists all the nude scenes of major actresses by the minute, presumably so you can fast forward to the boob shots.
The patter among these characters (played by Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel and Martin Starr) is hilariously vacuous. There’s a moment when Ben gets a call for a date and the other guys start miming having sex that stands as a defining portrait of the male roommate, circa 2007. Rogen has a chunky, matter-of-fact lack of pretension, which makes Ben one of those likeable slobs who populate all the best comedies these days.
As a matter of local pride, his character is supposed to be a Canadian from Vancouver (like Rogen himself). He’s in the U.S.
illegally, living on $14,000 that the B.C. government gave him 10 years earlier when he was hurt in a car accident.
He has $900 left, which he figures will last him another two years. This dreamboat gets himself hooked up with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl of Grey’s Anatomy), a rising “entertainment reporter” on TV who gets drunk one night at a nightclub and wakes up with Ben’s baby in her tummy. “I thought you had a patch or a dental dam,” he explains in the film’s catch-as-catch-can bow to the idea of family planning.
There’s a nice scene when Ben realizes that Allison is going to spend the evening with him and his face lights up with a grin of goofy triumph: the infrequently laid man gets lucky. Knocked Up is the romantic comedy about how these mismatched people get together slightly after the fact — to put it delicately — and while it ends the way you might expect, it is filled with touches you won’t expect, which is where Apatow comes in. He is a filmmaker who creates likeable losers and then honours them with something close to affection.
Knocked Up has its share of stomach upsets and coarse sensibilities — Ben’s uncensored explanation of his website bespeaks a man who probably hasn’t talked to a woman for a while — but you come away remembering mostly the respect with which it treats all sides of its arguments. Allison is frightened but hopeful; Ben is excited but lost. Their ups and downs seem natural, a rarity in romantic comedy.
The Ben and Allison story finds a parallel in a second relationship, between Allison’s sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), one of those passionate women who passions have turned into a fiercely held unhappiness, and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd, another Virgin alumnus), who stays on the sidelines of his life as much as possible. One of the nicer things about Knocked Up is that it becomes something of a love story between Ben and Pete as well. “How can you fight with him?
,” Ben asks Debbie. “Look at his face. I just want to kiss it.
” He means this in the most homophobic way possible, of course, but it’s heartening. Knocked Up follows Allison’s pregnancy from conception to birth with several side trips — gynecologist-shopping, a boy’s trip to Las Vegas that allows for some Swingers references (“you’re so money”), a manufactured crisis between Debbie and Pete — that take away some of the focus. But you end up liking these people and rooting for them.
If Apatow can rein himself in a bit, he’ll be a force to be reckoned with.
News RSS