Monday, Aug. 03, 2009

Sandler, Apatow shine with 'Funny People'

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Here's the measure of how flawless Judd Apatow's track record has been: when I saw Adam Sandler was the star of Apatow's new Funny People, I stopped thinking it would blow before the trailer was done.

When I say I think Sandler's a clown, and not one of the good ones but one that inflates your cat like a balloon and knots it up into a bulbous balloon dog, understand I say that as someone who thinks Billy Madison (and to a lesser extent Happy Gilmore) is a hilarious masterpiece and the spiritual godfather of the violent, absurdist comedies Will Ferrell usually stars in these days. Sandler used to be killer.

-- Trailer, times, theaters.

She's now married to someone else.

-- Read Mr. Movie's review.

Brilliantly, Funny People opens with a clip of him not as he's known now -- that guy who spends all movie screaming lobotomized jokes until a lethally sappy ending where he learns the meaning of love -- but as he used to be way way back when, quick-witted and winningly goofy. The clip itself is funny; so is the brutally clear point about Sandler. Oddly life-affirming as it is, Funny People comes out with its teeth showing, too.

Seth Rogen's trying to be a stand-up, but in the meantime he's working at a grocery deli, failing to impress the crowds on open mike night, and getting mocked by his more successful friends.

Sandler's on the other end of the career arc, a dude who used to be seriously funny but who's since cashed in to do a series of awful, low-brow comedies. After he's diagnosed with terminal leukemia, his instincts are to jump back on the stage and get back to his roots.

Thing is, he's way out of practice, and he's in a darker place these days. To get back on track, he hires Rogen to write jokes for him, developing an unlikely friendship and launching Rogen's career.

To imply that's the entire plot is like saying Lord of the Rings is about a misbehaving piece of jewelry. Writer/director Apatow has always kept his movies loose and wide-ranging, and Funny People covers the most territory yet. It could easily have felt plodding and unfocused if it weren't so damn good.

To the surprise of no one but unfrozen cavemen and time-travelers from 1998, that distant time before the Legions of Apatownia began to put their hilarious boot to our throats, Funny People is very, very funny. The fact it's billed as a drama must be especially humiliating for everyone else in Hollywood who makes a living trying to make people laugh, because apparently even Apatow's serious movies are funnier than anything else on the screen.

They're also so unformulaic they make math textbooks combust and lesser screenwriters continue not caring that everything they write feels like copies of itself. When Sandler learns he's fought off his illness, it doesn't exactly give him a new lease on life and make him so wise God invites him up to Heaven to help retroactively revise that whole Leviticus thing. Sandler tries to do better, yeah, but it turns out doing better is really effing hard.

The realism of the movie's emotions is propped up at every turn by the strength of its details and the subtly unflattering picture of the nasty side of what it means to be a comedian, from their backbiting to the way they wave their fame around like a flag where the national symbol is a lady taking off her clothes.

Apatow's been a stand-up himself, and judging from the 12,000 cameos in Funny People he knows everyone alive who's ever told a joke, from Ray Romano and Paul Reiser on down to the guy who writes the Laffy Taffy wrappers. His understanding of that world feels encyclopedic; when he criticizes it, it's with the professionalism of a trained assassin.

That by itself would have made the movie. Along with Sandler's performance -- he's basically playing a version of himself, but in a made-up fantasy world where he became funny again, and at the same time emerged as a lonely, tragic figure -- Funny People is a dominant, surprising experience. It may be Apatow's best yet.

Grade: A