Old Yorker

Judd Apatow (2009)

Twenty years ago, when they were both starting out in comedy, Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler shared an apartment.  They recorded Sandler making wind-up phone calls and Apatow uses this home video as the opening sequence of Funny People.  The audience can assume it’s a video featuring a youthful version of the comedy star that Sandler plays in the film, and one of the routines in the video is picked up towards the end of the picture.  But the use of this footage is a clear indication, if it were needed, that Funny People is about Apatow’s and perhaps Sandler’s feelings about their way of life and success as much as it’s the story of their fictional alter egos, respectively George Simmons and Ira Wright (né Wiener – pronounced ‘Whiner’, as we’re repeatedly reminded).

George Simmons (like Sandler), after making his name as a stand-up, moved to Hollywood and made hugely popular comedies.  (The premises of the two movies we hear and see the most about are believable, to say the least.  In ‘Re Do’, the Simmons character becomes a baby and, during his return to infancy, learns the lesson of what it takes to live as a man.  ‘The Merman’ is self-explanatory.)  Simmons lives, alone and self-absorbed, in a vast Los Angeles mansion.  He learns that he’s terminally ill (a blood disease) and decides to return to the Improv club in LA he started out at, where he does a couple of starkly morbid routines and meets Ira, who’s getting nowhere fast in his comedy career.   Ira shares an apartment with Leo, a slightly more successful stand-up, and Mark, who’s recently become one of the stars of a derided TV high school sitcom (‘Yo Teach!’).  George likes what he hears of Ira’s material and invites him and Leo to write for him (Ira accepts eagerly, without telling Leo).   Once George tells him about his illness, Ira becomes his confidant and nursemaid too.   He feels the strain of the secret and persuades George to tell others.  George makes contact with his estranged family and with Laura, the actress he was going to marry before he cheated on her and she broke up with him.

His doctors decide at the outset that George’s illness can’t be treated by chemo- or radiotherapy.  They try instead an aggressive experimental medication which, in order to combat the disease, comes close to destroying his immune system but the treatment works and George is given the all-clear.  Most of the last third of the picture focuses on the renewal of his relationship with Laura, and his and Ira’s visit to her Northern California home, where they meet her two daughters and, eventually, Laura’s Australian businessman husband Clarke, when he unexpectedly returns.  Laura is forced to decide between George and Clarke; she chooses Clarke and, because Ira has tried to encourage her in that direction, George fires him as his assistant.  Ira returns to his day job at a deli counter and George comes to see him there (this is where the routine from the Apatow-Sandler home video – a Jewish woman complaining to a supermarket about the life-threatening roast beef she’s bought from them – is virtually reprised).    The film ends with a rapprochement between George and Ira, with George offering to write some stand-up material for Ira.

Apatow sets up the situation very economically:  he establishes where George has come from, where he now is, and where he looks to be heading in less than five minutes.  George’s announcements of his illness and the doctors’ confirmation of his recovery arrive quickly and unemphatically and are the stronger for that.   Otherwise, however, Funny People is long-winded and those who, like David Denby, appear to think Apatow is now a serious artist because he takes his time and because the film has dark subject matter and a mainly acrid tone, are confusing sluggish negativity with depth.   (In fact Funny People (136 minutes) is not much longer than either of Apatow’s two previous features, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (116 minutes) and Knocked Up (128 minutes).)    Is the film, as its title suggests, specifically about the psychology of comedians (or, even more specifically, the psychology of Jewish comedians)?   It’s set in various parts of the professional comedy universe but the lineaments of George Simmons’s character are familiar enough from films about celebrities who aren’t comedy performers.  George is the star who’s so self-centred that he’s ultimately incapable of anything other than self-love (and the self-hate that goes with it).  The film’s conclusion also feels generic, revealing him as unfit for marriage but equipped to mend professionally useful fences and to carry on with his showbiz proxy for ‘real life’.  The fact that he is now supplying gags for Ira could be interpreted as George finding a grain of altruism inside him but just as easily as an underlining of the limits of his capacity to think of other people – he can think of them only as other performers.  Either way, this ending is perfunctorily upbeat and you’re not convinced that Apatow means it.  He seems to see progress in show business as essentially self-serving.  Even the affable and relatively humane Ira makes the most of his big break by depriving Leo of a share in it.  (Why the two main characters share the names of the Gershwin brothers isn’t clear.)

Funny People is an uneasy mixture of cynicism and sentimentality.  Apatow avoids the heartwarming pitfalls of the tale of the bastard brought face-to-face with dying who makes the most of a second chance to live a good life; he does so by demonstrating that George Simmons is irredeemably selfish (his truly incurable disease).   In contrast, the family life which is shown to be beyond George is idealised to pretty ludicrous effect, perhaps because Apatow sees his family life as sacrosanct to the extent that it can’t be made fun of.  He (like Sandler) is married with children, his wife is Leslie Mann, who plays Laura, and Laura’s children are played by their daughters, Maude and Iris Apatow.  Laura has told George that she regrets marrying Clarke – that ‘he’s an Australian version of you’ who, like George, has been unfaithful to her.  Almost as soon as George and Ira arrive at the family home, Laura enthusiastically goes to bed with George.  But in the climactic scene, when George asks Laura ‘Is it him or me?’, Laura tearfully, but without a trace of irony, answers, ‘It’s him – of course it’s him.  He’s my husband.  He’s the father of my children’.

The film has a weaker strain of sentimentality about male-female relationships more generally – although there are few enough women in evidence.  In addition to the lovely Leslie Mann and her lovely daughters, there’s Daisy, another of the young would-be stand-ups (Aubrey Plaza, who has a droll deadpan in her exchanges with Ira – even if we see little of Daisy as a performer).  Ira fancies Daisy but, in spite of the content of his comedy routine, he’s excessively hesitant with girls and Daisy sleeps with Mark before Ira’s got his offstage act together.    When he responds angrily, she accuses him of sexual hypocrisy, complaining that most men see sleeping around as harmless except when a girl’s doing it (she also points out that this brief argument is the longest conversation she and Ira have had).   There’s clearly truth in what Daisy says but the scene contributes to the pervading sense in the film that men, compared with women, are emotionally underdeveloped and that this is somehow their (men’s) saving grace.  Although Seth Rogen is likeable as Ira, this comes across especially in his tedious interactions with the two others in the apartment (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman).

As George, Adam Sandler (whom I’d not seen before, except in trailers) never suggests the potential to be other than self-centred and conscious of it.  That may be the whole point of the character but Sandler doesn’t do enough to make you believe that other people could be conned or charmed into thinking George capable of more.   George is supposed to be dislikeable and scared and one of Sandler’s best moments comes in the interview with a Swedish medic (well played by Torsten Voges), where George defends himself against bad news by making jokes about Dr Lars’ appearance and accent.   On the whole, though, Sandler’s interpretation of George’s self-loathing and Apatow’s writing of the character make it less interesting than the size of the role requires.

Even though Apatow’s unmediated feelings about his real home life eventually play him false in the sequence at Laura’s home, Funny People certainly perks up at this stage, thanks largely to Eric Bana as Clarke.  Like the Penélope Cruz character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we hear a lot about Clarke before we meet him and, like Cruz, Bana makes a spectacular entrance.   He first broke through in a sketch show on Australian television but this is the first time I’ve seen him do comedy; now that I have, I hope even more than I did before that Bana’s big-screen career doesn’t live or die in Hulk/hunk roles.  According to Wikipedia, it was the actor’s idea to make Clarke an Australian; Bana felt that would make it easier for him to improvise.  He gives Clarke a mixture of smiley, macho competitiveness and lachrymose spirituality that’s very funny.  (Because he sells to Eastern markets, Clarke has not only learned Mandarin but also acquired Buddhism, for use as required.)  Bana gives Clarke a family-man credibility that appears to suit Apatow’s purposes but which never takes the character out of an essentially satirical frame (and that – pleasingly – works against Apatow’s sentimental intentions).  It’s a brilliantly precise performance, full of comic zest, which lights up the whole film.  The two Apatow girls are good too and the crucial sequence in which Laura shows George and Ira a recording of the elder daughter Mabel singing ‘Memory’ (from Cats) at a school concert is very effective.   (Mabel’s precocious competence is both compelling and alienating;  it makes sense both of Laura’s and Ira’s admiring reaction and George’s jealously derisive response – which is meant to reveal he’s not cut out to be a husband and father.)

Although the story is easy to follow, there are several features of Funny People that I found it hard to get to grips with.  The sex lives of the characters, for a start, sometimes made me think I was watching a film about a different civilisation.  More important, I struggled to understand whether the stand-up routines were supposed to be funny or not.  That was partly because I didn’t find any of them funny and partly because both the on-screen club and theatre audiences and the audience in the Richmond Odeon seemed to find all of them funny (including George’s graveyard routines, although David Denby reckons that these shock his comedy club audiences into hostility).  At one point, George criticises Ira for the lack of variety in his material, for the fact that it’s all sexual aggression and fart jokes; but nearly all the onstage acts in the film, and most of the banter offstage, are dominated by the former (and by penis size jokes).   When Ira makes George an iPod playlist of songs to cheer him up in his terminal condition, the first two are ‘Three Little Birds’ (‘Don’t worry about a thing … ‘) by Bob Marley and ‘I Had the Time of My Life’.  These are treated as jokes – examples of Ira’s inadvertent insensitivity, given George’s condition.  The third number, ‘Keep Me In Your Heart’ by someone called Warren Zevon, sounded to me like more of the same but was obviously supposed to be apt and moving.  There are cameo appearances by lots of celebrities, comics and others, among whom I recognised only James Taylor (even without the clue of his being announced as James Taylor).  I didn’t recognise Eminem, Paul Reiser or Sarah Silverman and hadn’t even heard of the others.   I don’t actually think any of this disqualifies me from having a valid opinion about Funny People but, for some reason, I feel I have to admit these things …

31 August 2009