Are Judd Apatow's Movies Just Chick Flicks for Dudes?

This is the third entry in a dialogue about the films of Judd Apatow and the state of the romantic comedy among Double X Managing Editor Jessica Grose, Slate critic Troy Patterson, and Variety contributor Lael Loewenstein. Read the first entry here [2], and the second entry here [3].

Troy and Jessica:

Glad to join the discussion. You’ve left me with plenty to contemplate.

Funny People is Judd Apatow’s most tonally ambitious movie. It’s also his least successful. Up until now the films he’s directed have explored male friendship and insecurity vis-à-vis heterosexual initiation and dating (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), and impending parenthood (Knocked Up). Funny People raises the bar: As Apatow described it [4] to the L.A. Times’ John Horn, “It’s a mentor story. It’s a disease movie. It’s a coming-of-age movie. It’s a movie about trying to restart an old romance. It’s 11 different movies rolled into one.” And that’s its problem. In wanting to be so many different things at once, it does none of them particularly well.

For a female viewer, the earlier films offered a fascinating and hilarious window into the mechanics and rituals of male bonding, presented in Apatow’s signature combination of raunchy, male-centric bravado and woman-friendly emotional warmth. Virgin’s Andy (Steve Carell) and Knocked Up’s Ben (Seth Rogen) are likable geeks, socially awkward guys who, despite their remarkable ineptitude with women, are validated by their essential sweetness. Funny People’s Ira (Rogen) is struck from the same mold. Emotionally immature, coarse-humored and relatively inexperienced sexually, he can’t score with Daisy (Aubrey Plaza) to save his life.

When George Simmons (Adam Sandler) takes Ira under his wing, it’s the first meaningful relationship that Ira has had. Unlike the SmartTech colleagues in Virgin and the stoner dudes in Knocked Up, Ira’s fiercely competitive roommates (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman) offer neither advice nor solace, but rather a daily diet of derision. With George, Ira finds a job (assistant/joke writer), a role (confidant) and, in effect, a family. It’s not for nothing that they’re named after the Gershwin brothers. But it’s a deeply complicated friendship, to be sure: “You’re my best friend,” George tells Ira, “and I don’t even like you.”

Without a doubt, the central relationship in Funny People is the bromance between George and Ira: their dialogue crackles and their scenes together spark with the love-hate dynamic that is one of the cornerstones of smart romantic comedy. By contrast, George’s chemistry with Laura (Leslie Mann), "the one who got away," feels flat and forced. Consequently, the movie’s second half, in which George gets a second chance when his disease goes into remission, suffers by comparison to the first.

Which leads me back to Jessica’s question: What narrative purpose does Laura serve? Though she’s ostensibly the love interest, I see her more as a catalyst for the inevitable demise (and subsequent rebirth) of the Ira-George relationship. Outwardly, the film’s love triangle consists of George, Laura, and her husband Clark (Eric Bana). But its more intriguing triangle involves Ira, not Clark. Although George nearly wrecks Laura’s marriage, it is actually Laura who poses the much bigger threat to the film’s central relationship when she shows Ira the depths of George’s narcissism. As Ira tells George, “You’re the only person I know who could have a near-death experience and learn absolutely nothing.” Only after George and Ira have severed their friendship—in effect, broken up—can Ira finally move forward with Daisy. And only after a period of isolation and introspection can George show any signs of growth and move toward a rapprochement with Ira.

Compared to the women of the earlier films, Funny People’s Laura is the least compelling and the least developed, but she’s hardly a cipher. A cousin to Virgin’s Trish and Knocked Up’s Alison, she struggles to find balance in her life and yearns to reboot her acting career. Though she loves her family, Laura acknowledges a certain longing in her life. (Mann put her own career on the back burner to raise her children with Apatow; he credits her with providing an emotionally authentic female voice in his films.)

So does all this make Apatow’s films sexist? Phallocentric, yes. Sexist, not exactly. True, the men of Knocked Up have more fun than the women, particularly when you juxtapose the guys’ Vegas trip with the girls’ misbegotten nightclub outing. The female roles are indeed secondary in the films. But there is a range to Apatow’s women, from the sexually liberated Elizabeth Banks character in Virgin, to the astute wife Mann plays in Knocked Up, to the deadpan, terrifically sharp Plaza in Funny People. Moreover, female audiences are drawn to Apatow films not because we want to be entertained by watching women explore their emotional attitudes about relationships—we’ve got Sex and the City for that—but because we want to laugh while watching men navigate treacherous emotional terrain. It’s something we don’t often get to see in life or on film. As my husband rather indelicately put it, “Apatow movies are like chick flicks with dicks.”

Apatow’s brand of hermaphroditic cinema finds its literal embodiment in another of the films-within-the-film. While Jessica referenced Re-Do, in which George plays a baby with an adult head digitally attached, a winking meta-commentary on the kinds of films for which Sandler himself has become famous, I would suggest that Merman, in which George plays a half male/half female sea creature (whose cries apparently are a source of female sexual arousal) is an equally fitting emblem for Apatovian gender politics: men work out their issues and insecurities largely through discussion and deliberation, an avenue traditionally open only to women.

But here’s what I want to know, Jessica and Troy: Do you think that Apatow’s movies privilege the bromance to the point where a fully functional heterosexual relationship is impossible? In Funny People, it would seem to be the case. In Knocked Up, you could argue that the most dynamic relationship is the one that develops between married guy Pete (Paul Rudd) and the soon-to-be married Ben. In Virgin, Andy finally seems to have found a promising relationship with Trish. But the movie ends just as they consummate their relationship—capped by a hilariously dreamy dance rendition of “Let the Sunshine In." Is Apatow saying you can’t be a guy’s guy and have a girlfriend/wife at the same time? Or can you?

Looking forward to the next installment.

Best,
Lael

Read Jessica Grose's response here [5].