Funny People
Director: Judd Apatow
Writer: Judd Apatow
Producers: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, Clayton Townsend
Stars: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Bana, Aubrey Plaza
“What are future generations going to say about us, my God!
(points at ape skeleton next to him)
You know, someday, we’re gonna…we’re gonna be like him. I mean, you know, and he was probably one of the beautiful people, he was probably dancing and playing tennis, and everything, and…and now look, this is what happens to us! You know, it’s very important to have…to have some kind of personal integrity, or, you know…I’ll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure when I…thin out…that I’m well thought of.”
–Woody Allen, Manhattan
I’ll say one thing for Funny People – the title isn’t lying. Filmmaking hyphenate Judd Apatow has cast this, his third directorial effort after very-funny previous films The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, with a full boat of actors known for stimulating laughter in the moviegoing masses. And on-screen they engage in stand-up comedy, movie and sitcom acting, sexual/romantic hijinks, and male bonding – these are notoriously funny activities.
But this is a movie with a restless and self-loathing nature, like many of its characters. They, and the movie in which they live, flail around from one plot to another, wanting more out of life than to be Funny People. This movie yearns to be serious, mature, insightful, passionate; it wants to be about death and real love as well as dick jokes. That’s ambition and I respect that. That respect, though, does not forestall me from saying when a movie is trying to do more than it knows how to do.
What Apatow has actually made is a dramedy paradoxically matched in bloat by pithiness. It is too long, but takes damaging short cuts, all while trying to teach us that getting there is half the fun. It kneecaps any possibility of self-reflection by the characters by not giving them much in the way of character at the outset, yet banks on our intimacy with them to make the goings-on worth watching when they are not funny. And, ultimately, it goes a lot of somewheres but it gets nowhere. Yes, I laughed, but on the movie’s self-defined terms, that is not enough.
Adam Sandler plays a stand-up comedian-turned-movie star named George Simmons, though he might as well be referred to as Adam Sandler – the movie does not care to distinguish the two. It wants our awareness of Adam Sandler the Phenomenon as Cliff’s Notes character exposition. Simmons/Sandler pads unenthusiastically around a Hollywood fantasy mansion maintained by an army of maids and landscapers, rides a private jet to a corporate party where he will collect a six-figure check to do ten minutes of jokes, and enjoys the company of women who he knows only have sex with him for the anecdote. His fortune was made from starring in movies that this movie is singularly interested in portraying as awful and stupid.
Simmons learns that he has one of those movie diseases that is very likely fatal, but does not hamper his looks or degrade his physical fitness in any way, and whose best course for treatment is a highly-experimental regimen of pills that have no apparent side effects. Apatow has decided to eliminate all the conventional obstacles that represent the abstract concepts people wrestle with, and simply have Simmons wrestle with the concepts. He does this with a mixture of morose humor and obsessive nostalgia, mixed with the occasional juvenile temper tantrum. He is not malicious but he is not a nice man, either – it’s not necessary that he be nice, but if it can’t prove he is interesting when he is not being a Funny People, the movie collapses.
Deciding to make a return to his stand-up roots, he takes to club stages, where he sings morbid songs and befuddles his audience. Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), a struggling stand-up with the misfortune of having to follow one of Simmons’ impromptu appearances, does the only thing he can do, the thing a comedian is supposed to do: to say the thing others are too afraid or polite to say. Wright is our hero and stand-in – the ordinary, well-meaning, hard-trying fella who gets to walk into a wholly-different world and hopefully grow from the adventure. Simmons asks him to help him write some new jokes, and an uneasy friendship/partnership begins.
Rogen is naturally both funny and charming, so it was a shock to see him work so hard, and so unsuccessfully, at achieving these qualities in this role. It’s never looked like work for him before. Part of the problem is that Ira has his own separate movie that keeps interfering – about his struggles to find his comedic voice (that could have been a good movie), and his awkward pursuit of a female comic (Aubrey Plaza) whose obvious faults do not make up for the fact that she likes hip bands (that was never going to be a good movie). He and a fellow struggling comic played by Jonah Hill live in the house of a smarmy and egocentric actor friend named Mark Taylor Jackson (Jason Schwartzman), who stars in a terrible NBC sitcom. I don’t know why this movie wants to say that you achieve success in LA by working on lame projects and acting like a jerkoff, but that is absolutely what the movie is saying.
But when he is not mired in that petty nonsense, Ira spends his days and nights with Simmons, learns the secret of his disease, encourages him to tell others and try to make something of his final days. This leads to a long stretch of cameo appearances from other celebrities and stand-up comedians who are playing themselves – the Funniest People in the movie turns out to be Eminem, which I would not have predicted.
Then Simmons learns he is, in fact, cured, and now wants to prove he has Learned Something by Facing Death. He decides this means he should reunite with the woman he loved who got away, his old girlfriend Laura (Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann), who gave up acting, moved north, and married an Australian of Zen machismo played by Eric Bana. Bana is the second Funniest People in the movie, and I would not have predicted that, either. But I would not have a predicted the existence of a movie that makes it appear as if Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill have no comedic chemistry with one another.
Any academic discussion of humor – and we know how hilarious they are – regularly cites distance as a factor in laughter. Or, as Mel Brooks put it best: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die”. And that might be one of the chief failings of Funny People – it is cast with people for which Apatow feels an expansive real-life warmth and love, doing what he obviously loves watching them do. The movie opens with real-life video footage, shot when he and Sandler were struggling roommates in their 20’s, of Sandler making prank calls, and Apatow sniggering uncontrollably off camera.
But those are the kinds of laughs that arise out of friendship, from long hours together with hunger and sugar and alcohol and familiarity, and that old video just isn’t funny to us the way it is to Apatow. It’s because we don’t know The Real Adam – which the movie wants us to understand so we’ll watch Simmons’ laments, even as it wants us to feel the same affection as if we do. Sandler is appreciably sincere with what he is given, it should be said, but the script’s ratio of incidents to genuine character-building efforts is fatally out-of-whack; and it’s only after we have spent two hours Getting To Know these people that the movie turns into farce, for which the most important element is that distance I mentioned. What a miscalculation; the final irony is that the strictly “funny” movies that brought Apatow to this point in his career showed more heart, insight, and storytelling talent than anything on display here.