This Is 40 (***1/4)

Judd Apatow revisits the supporting couple Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), from his movie Knocked Up. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen that movie—none of the other major characters makes an appearance here—but if you did and liked the alternately argumentative and simpatico duo this is more of the same. If you liked the mix of crude humor and emotion, there’s still a little bit of raunch, occasionally seeming forced. I guess in Los Angeles women confide sexual intimacies to their trainer, like that their husband took Viagra. (Pete didn’t need to, but  it was Debbie’s birthday and “I thought you’d think it was fun for me to supersize it for once,” he says.) But they have bigger problems, mostly money problems. Pete’s independent record label is foundering, thanks in part to its inability to get fans to buy the latest album from 1970s/’80s semi-star Graham Parker. (Parker plays himself.) Debbie thinks someone’s stealing from her clothes store. They communicate poorly, except when they don’t.

I’ve liked all of Apatow’s work and liked this. Apatow’s ability to craft natural-sounding dialogue, along with some that’s improvised, is the movie’s forte, which is good in a talky movie. His characters, including the minor ones (like John Lithgow and Albert Brooks as the difficult fathers of Pete and Debbie) are consistently engaging, so long as one does not conflate that with being admirable. I appreciate that Apatow resists the impulse to make his characters always likable (or perfect parents). Whether Mann and Apatow’s daughters Iris and Maud, who play Pete and Debbie’s bickering kids, are the best child actors is open to debate, but they seem more like real kids than many seen on screen. The early scenes may seem somewhat disjointed, and lighter in tone, not fully setting up the more confrontational second part.

I normally wouldn’t recommend the outtakes that sometimes play over the closing credits; usually they’re just the actors laughing, but in this case it’s an amazing thing to watch Melissa McCarthy continuing a lengthy, probably improvised rant without breaking character as her costars giggle and obviously render the scene unusable.

IMDb link

viewed 6/29/13 on iPad (from Netflix DVD) and reviewed 6/29–7/6/13