Funny People

Funny People (***)

Judd Apatow's first two directorial efforts, and The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up are both amongst the most acclaimed comedies of the decade, and he's been involved with a whole potpourri of other popular comedies in recent years --Anchorman, Pineapple Express, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, etc., etc.--as a either writer or producer. As such, he's become something of a household name, or certainly more of one than most people who are involved in movies but are never actually in front of the camera. Evidently, with the success of Apatow's films, he's built up enough of a reputation to allow him to make a pretty unconventional comedy in Funny People. 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up are somewhat unconventional themselves, but not like Funny People is, a 2 hour and 20 minute comedy centered partly around death. A lot of people have complained about its length, and while I can say that my interest was maintained from start to finish, it certainly is true that the script is somewhat uneven, and at times it kind of feels like Apatow tried to take two or three different ideas for movies and throw them all together. I do appreciate that Apatow is trying to think outside of the box, even if it doesn't all work. I'd take a hundred movies like this over most of the paint-by-numbers mainstream comedies out there.

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a character who is fictional, but who obviously is intended to be not at all dissimilar to Sandler himself. He's a forty-something comedian, who got his start doing stand-up but who has since hit the big time in Hollywood, starring in a bunch of movies. All of them are knock offs of formulaic Hollywood comedies--like Re-do, where Sandler/Simmons asks a wizard to make him younger and he ends up turning into a baby, and and another where he's an entrant in the 4th of July hot dog eating contest with his son in the crowd yelling, "Dad! This won't bring mom back!" to which he replies, amid hot dog chews, "I have no other choice!!" Its pretty clear that some of them are polite jabs at some of Sandler's actual mediocre, fairly milquetoast movies, like Big Daddy. As we're first introduced to him, he's meeting with his doctor who's telling him that he has a rare form of leukemia, and that its at an advanced enough stage such that his only chance may be experimental medicine. Suddenly realizing there may be a clock running on his life, Simmons shows up to a comedy club that he hasn't performed at in years and gives a somewhat, shall we say, abstract performance which the audience isn't quite sure what to make of. He's followed by Ira Wright, a struggling young comedian played by Seth Rogan. Ira isn't yet at the point where he actually gets paid to tell jokes, and so he spends his days working at the deli in a grocery store. He's a nervous wreck to begin with, and having to follow a legend and one of his idols in the form of George Simmons only makes things worse. It looks like his set is going to tank until he's able to recover by ad libbing jokes about how bad and uncomfortable Simmons' set was.

After the show, Ira returns to his makeshift place of living, that being a cot in his friend's apartment (Jason Schwartzman), who has made it being starring as a high school teacher in a fairly terrible NBC sitcom called "Yo, Teach!" Also living with him is Leo, played by the always funny Jonah Hill, who is himself a struggling young comedian who tries to attract people to his comedy site by making You Tube videos of him dancing with cats. Unexpectedly, Ira gets a call from George asking if he and/or Leo would want to write jokes for him and be something of an assistant. Ira basically pretends as though the "or your friend Leo" part doesn't exist--something with briefly becomes an issue later--and accepts the job himself. In his first 24 hours with George, Ira sees how George takes full advantage of his celebrity. The two of them perform at a corporate gig for Myspace (with a funny cameo by James Taylor), and they end up bringing back two random girls to George's place, both of which end up having sex with George. The next day, though, George comes down with a big container full of pills and confides in Ira that he's sick. There are a few very well done dramatic scenes by Apatow here, as George's health begins to spiral downwards, like when George is on stage singing a very sarcastic song about how the audience won't know what to do when he's gone and how he never liked them anyway, intercut with scenes of him vomiting in his bathroom facing his very actual, factual death. I never saw Punch Drunk Love, which is usually considered far and away Adam Sandler's best dramatic performance, and so to see him here doing something more involved than just making funny voices and getting into a fight with Bob Barker (not that that can't be entertaining) was something I much appreciated.

The thing is though, George gets diagnosed, gets worse, comes to terms with his mortality and becomes a pretty person because of it, and gets better all within the first half of the movie. I don't really think I'm spoiling anything here because they actually show the scene where the doctor that George and Ira think sounds like Alan Rickman from Die Hard tells them that the medication seems to have worked and that George may have beaten the disease. The second half of the movie turns into a love triangle situation, as George tries to win back Laura (Leslie Mann), a woman who he once upon a time was going to marry, but ended up cheating on. She's now married to a guy named Clark (Eric Bana) and has two daughters. George thinks that getting back together with Laura is sort of his ticket to true happiness, while Ira basically thinks he's going to end up destroying someone else's family and still be miserable. The whole thing is sort of tangentially related to the plot of the first half of the movie in that almost dying gives George a sort of revelation about what sort of person he is and what he wants out of life, but at times it also feels like a totally different movie. Its also not quite as funny. As George and Laura try and keep secret the fact that they're still sort of in love with each other secret from her husband Clark, there are a couple of scenes that devolve into just sort of slapstick weirdness that would probably fit into something like Anchorman, but not so much this movie, which is supposed to be funny but also dealing with serious things.

A couple of other scenes elsewhere are genuinely funny, but again don't seem to fit with what the tone of the movie is going for. There's a very funny cameo by Ray Ramano, but the circumstances of it are so preposterous that it's not that easy to accept it as being part of the same movie in which the main character is battling cancer. Funny People seemingly represents Judd Apatow, with a couple of films under his belt, trying to stretch the boundaries of what a mainstream comedy can do. He throws a lot of stuff at the wall, and a lot of it sticks, but it sort of sticks together and congeals such that you end up with a big mass of you're not sure what. Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen are tremendously entertaining in the leads, and they play off of each other's strengths tremendously well, but the movie is too scatterbrained to really be considered great. As I said at the beginning of this though, I appreciate Apatow trying to do something not quite like any other comedy that's out there. I'd take 100 of these before one of The Goods, although I do laugh every time I see the commercial where the old guy punches the Asian guy because Jeremy Piven made some reference to Pearl Harbor. I'm not really sure why.