Funny People (***1/2)

With a couple of television shows and a slew of hits as producer, director, and writer, Judd Apatow would seem well qualified to create a movie about show business that also draws on his early experience as a stand-up comic (and, not incidentally, has lots of his show-biz friends in cameo roles). Apatow doesn’t act in the feature, his third as director (after The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up), but Adam Sandler, his one-time roommate, does. Sandler’s character is like a less-happy version of Adam Sandler. He makes movies like Re-Do, where he turns into a baby (with Sandler’s head), and Merman, where he turns into Ethel Merman. No, actually, he turns into a half-fish, half-human creature. The fake clips from these films are funny because they could actually be clips from movies Sandler would have made. On the other hand, Sandler has made a few more grown-up films, like Spanglish, Reign on Me, and Punch-Drunk Love. He’s played pathetic before (Punch-Drunk Love), but this may be the first time he’s played a character that is meant to be a little unlikeable. (I say meant to be, as I Now Pronouce You Chuck and Larry, among others, showed his ability to play a character that’s actually unlikeable.)

Apatow go-to-guy Seth Rogen also mildly departs from type by playing a sort-of-regular guy who mostly only curses when he’s on stage performing. He’s the unsuccessful comic (Rogen) rooming with a mildly successful comic (Jonah Hill) and a financially successful (but starring in an awful sitcom) actor (Jason Schwartzman). Schwartzman’s fake sitcom scenes are, again, funny because they so resemble actual awful sitcoms you’ve seen. Hill is almost the same vulgarity-spewing character as in Superbad or Knocked Up. Told that Rogen’s romantic interest (Aubrey Plaza) is “like a mouse,” he says, “Yeah, a mouse you want to stick your dick into.” Sandler represents the megastar living an empty lifestyle, with such a lack of actual friends, that Rogen, unexpectedly hired as his assistant and occasional joke writer, serves as his primary confidant.

The celebrity actor’s diagnosis with a potentially fatal illness spurs the plot, but whereas the easy thing to do would be to have Sandler completely transform into a new person, that’s not exactly what happens, and it’s his new assistant whose life gets turned around even as he watches the boss try to reconnect with an old, married flame (Leslie Mann). The first half of this movie is fairly light and fairly funny, and the second is sometimes funny but also serious. The plot sort of changes direction, but in a pleasing way. It’s two hours long, but feels better paced than Knocked Up. (And Rogen and Plaza, or Rogen and Sandler, make a more believable couple than Rogen and Katherine Heigl.) It’s still recognizably an Apatow property, and not just because his two young daughters act (quite well) in the movie, but also edges into the turf covered by someone like James L. Brooks, who made Sandler’s Spanglish as well as Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News.

IMDB link

viewed 2/6/10 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 2/9–3/1/10