I’m a fan of Judd Apatow’s films – even the moments that revel in fecophilia. The 40 Year Old Version explores sweetness and shyness in a world of one-night stands and flings. Knocked Up looks at a man on the verge of being thrust into fatherhood – or, more accurately, a woman who becomes a mother the day that the stick turns blue. Even Funny People, a film that veered in tone and style from the previous two, gives us a man in George Simmons forced to come to terms with his own mortality at a relatively young age.
Each of these films offers a lens on the perpetual adolescent in the face of maturity, the need to mature and the desire to remain young at heart, and the importance of sincerity in a culture built by sound bites and status updates.
Going in to This is 40, I expected nothing less than a fine satire about humanity and the conflicts one finds in getting older. As opposed to the surprising parenthood in Knocked Up, and the delayed loss of virginity in The 40 Year Old Virgin, This is 40 offers a lack of alternatives. The two protagonists Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), both characters from Knocked Up, are too old to start over and too young to feel old. Their children Sadie and Charlotte (Apatow and Mann’s real-life daughters Maude and Iris) are a teenager and a pre-teen, respectively, and always at each other’s throats. They are too old to be constantly cute and too young to be left on their own. As Debbie and Pete drift further away from each other, they are uncomfortably and frustratingly moored together by their progeny.
The commentary here could be about the responsibilities felt after high school, the pressures to get married, appear successful, have a family, and create a lineage. Something could be said about the intricate significance of children in this dynamic. If there were no children – as alluded to in the film – perhaps their relationship would have ended fourteen years earlier. There would be no silly fights; there would be no deception; there would be no frustration.
Characteristically, the male protagonist is a persistent juvenile. Pete couldn’t get a real job, so he started a record label – one that is failing. As Debbie runs around in the morning, Pete dons his bicycling gear, eats cereal with his daughters, and protests that he would help if Debbie would just tell him what to do. At the same time, Debbie comes across as a control freak and seems to frighten Pete out of doing anything, which is one reason why Pete escapes to the bathroom “four times” a day to play iPad Scrabble and find solace. (Once again Apatow links feces with satisfaction as if he were writing a script while reviewing Freud’s Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis.)
Pete’s need to escape also labels Debbie as the characteristic adult in an Apatow film. She is more together and aware than her husband, but her turning forty in the beginning of the movie sets her off kilter. She constantly offers different years of birth when filling out forms – painfully and annoyingly exposited to us at her gynecologist’s office – and she refuses to celebrate a co-birthday with Pete, even though their birthdays fall during the same week and it is something they have always done.
This is 40 also attempts to look at the inconvenient, infringing oppression of family dynamics in general, assuming that all families are damaged, wonky, and destined to disintegrate. Debbie’s biological father, Oliver (John Lithgow), is initially cold, has a new life with new kids, and is predominantly absent. Pete’s father, Larry (Albert Brooks), is a perpetual mooch who lives off his son’s donations. He too is a man-child, but one that makes Pete look like father of the year. All things considered, Pete’s doing pretty well.
Unfortunately, it is the depiction of family dynamics that sinks This is 40. It has its funny moments, and the ending is pretty sweet if uberpredictable, but the characters are extremely underdeveloped, and everyone is a cartoonish stereotype. The problem stems from the tagline: “The sort-of sequel to Knocked Up,” an accurate one in that this film is more of a spin-off than a sequel. In Knocked Up, Pete and Debbie foreshadowed the potential difficulties in marriage for the shoved-together Ben (Seth Rogen) and Alison (Katherine Heigl). The bickering was funny but mature and off-set the immature bantering of Ben and his on-pillow-farting brood of stoners.
Here, their bickering is exacerbated, and they are simply snarky and passive aggressive. The most honest moments in the film are when they try to work through a therapist’s suggestion but can’t help but being contemptuously condescending, but this is only momentary. Their snarkiness that often devolves to jokes about sex or other bodily functions feels inorganic and reminds us of two-minute sketches thrown together. Most scenes – even if they start earnestly – are truncated and disjointed, devolving to discussions of sagging boobs, anal fissures, or farting in bed.
Essentially, this film suffers the fate of most spin offs: underdeveloped characters that were meant to be comic relief or bits of philosophical teachings. Save Frasier and 20% of shows affiliated with Happy Days or All in the Family, spin-offs flounder for this reason: the characters are shallow and ridiculous. They are punch lines without the build. They exist only to dance around themes and suggest that every relationship is an overflowing channel of frustration and regret.
The most earnest character – and best performance throughout – is Albert Brook’s Larry. He’s hilarious, offensive, and his lines are delivered with conviction, not as if he’s giving the audience a pause to laugh. The other bright spot is Melissa McCarthy’s ranting. She plays Catherine, the mother of the boy whom Debbie verbally assaults. However, these outtakes don’t arrive for 130 minutes, which means there’s plenty of dysfunction to sludge through.
