Knocked Up Release Date: June 1, 2007 Starring: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann Directed by: Judd Apatow
GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 6/1/07)
Smart but never snarky, sweet but never cloying, Knocked Up, the new comedy from 40-Year-Old Virgin co-writer–director Judd Apatow is also more genuinely frank and genuinely joyous than almost any recent Hollywood concoction I can recall. These qualities, plus the fact that Knocked Up is more often than not laugh-out-loud hilarious, go a long way in making up for its sprawling construction and, I hate to say it, implausibility.
It's not that I don't buy the premise that beautiful young career woman Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl, utterly disarming and down-to-earth) would hook up with teddy-bearish stoner slacker Ben Stone (Seth Rogan) while having a night on the town to celebrate her promotion to "on camera" talent on the E! channel. Nor that she would decide to keep the baby that they inadvertently made. Nor, even that she would consider taking on the fundamentally sweet but often thoroughly clueless Ben as not just a parenting but also a life partner. But my, oh my, this Alison has the patience of a saint, maintaining her politesse, say, even as Ben describes his "occupation," the creation of a nude-scenes-on-film website (he and his friends are too zonked to know that Mr. Skin already exists), in about the crassest terms possible. Yes, the oil-and-water combo makes for a lot of laughs as this odd couple wends its way to the birth of their child, but every now and then in the movie's first half I wanted to stand up and tell Alison to give Ben a good hard slap. And I'm, like, a guy.
But hey, that's why they invented suspension of disbelief I guess. And Apatow and the cast do a great job making you believe in the two opposing worlds of Ben and Alison. Ben's stoner buds are a motley, consistently bantering crew — the one bearded guy of the bunch keeps having to deal with questions like "How was Burning Man this year?" and "Was it weird when you changed your name from Cat Stevens to Yusuf Islam?" They're also thoroughly disgusting in the fine tradition of Animal House–derived yucks, as when they all give each other pink eye. Alison's married-with-children sister (Leslie Mann) and her husband (Paul Rudd) are a different but equally absurd kettle of fish, their arguments epic but eerie cage matches of insult brinksmanship.
As for the movie's sprawl, it exists for the right reasons. Apatow wants to cover a lot of ground — searching for the right gynecologist, shopping for baby things, sex while preggers, etc. — and he also wants to make some serious points without letting up on the laughs; e.g., a rumination on love as sacrificed that's couched within a mushroom-fueled Vegas sojourn for Rogan and Rudd's characters. My general philosophy on comedy is, "If His Girl Friday can do it in 92 minutes, why can't you?"; this picture comes in at 129, and no, not every minute works, but enough of them do, and work wonderfully, down to the most particular bits (I was particularly taken with SNL member Kristen Wiig's work as Alison's post–Valley Girl colleague) that it seems churlish to make too much of that. So I won't, especially given that as many nits as I might care to pick, nobody is doing this sort of thing better than Apatow and his crew.
