How Judd Apatow’s characters have become inside-Hollywood types.

This is the fifth 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, the second entry here, the third entry here and the fourth entry here.

Ladies:

I have been lost in pondering the questions you elegantly formulated—and also in wondering whether Funny People’s relatively weak opening weekend box-office take of $23 million reflects a growing fatigue with Apatow’s obsessions?

There seems to be a consensus that The 40-Year-Old Virgin is—in the roundness of its character and its sophisticated tenderness—a thing apart from Apatow’s two other films in particular and the school of “bromance” in general. It might be an outlier. It might also be a first-time director’s instinctive distillation of his worldview into its absurd essence. All of his heroes are 40-year-old virgins—socially maladroit, fretful about their lack of cool, not yet initiated into adult life.

In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, we witness something of Andy’s growth, but as Lael notes, the movie ends with his introduction to sexual maturity. In Knocked Up and Funny People, the coming-of-age happens all at once and rather too conveniently. In the latter film, Sandler’s George shucks off his complete self-absorption only in the last scene, and it’s typical of the movie’s unsatisfying storytelling that the transformation not only comes out of the blue but also appears motivated by the same emotional neediness that characterizes his behavior throughout the film. George’s epiphany has him authoring jokes for Ira to use in his stand-up act.

This resolution represents a perfectly natural expression of comic camaraderie. If you’ll permit me a crude, Apatow-like generalization: Dudes relate to one another through humor far more than chicks do. The teasing and ribbing and mockery to which the housemates of Knocked Up and Funny People subject one another constitute the most authentic moments of each of the films. But this also gets at a fundamental problem with Apatow: He tends to view the whole of human relations through the window of the entertainment world.

Knocked Up is sunk in a showbiz fishbowl where career aspirations involve cataloging actresses’ nude scenes and hosting a show on E! Its whole perspective and every reference derives from popular culture. At one point, Paul Rudd’s Pete—the husband of Leslie Mann’s character, who is largely a brittle shrew—ventures that marriage is “a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond,” which isn’t true, as even Raymond knows, and yet the movie seems to endorse the stance.

Tags: Apatow, Funny People, Knocked Up, the 40-year-old virgin

Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

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The Classic Story of Boy Meets Ira

A dialogue about Judd Apatow’s latest bromance, “Funny People.”

Jessica Grose
|
July 28, 2009

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

How Funny People, Knocked Up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin allow men to explore complex emotions.

Lael Loewenstein
|
July 30, 2009

The Sanctity of Dudehood in Apatow World

How women are exiles in Judd’s Guyville.

Troy Patterson
|
July 29, 2009

Arts

How Apatow Lost His Heart

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