Stereotypes drain some of the enjoyment out of this funny comedy, writes Donald Clarke
ECSTATIC advance word from the US suggests that Judd Apatow, director of the criminally funny 40-Year-Old Virgin, has achieved a kind of cinematic squaring of the circle with his second release.
If the more hysterical notices are to be believed, Knocked Up, in which Seth Rogen's layabout copes with an unexpected pregnancy, combines the social insight of Harold Pinter with
the damp, carnal humour of
the American Pie films. The mainstream sex comedy has - we are led to hope - reacquainted itself with conscience and responsibility.
There is some truth in these assertions. Apatow and his collaborators do have a knack for incorporating the natural rhythms of contemporary speech and the subtle inclinations of urban body language with a uniquely riotous class of sophomoric humour.
Knocked Up has its fair share of jokes involving public vomiting, the shaving of genitals and other pungent activities unseen in the plays of Noël Coward. But its funniest moments come courtesy of a persuasively subtle turn by Kristen Wiig as an assistant to the female lead's boss. By the merest tilting of her head or the temporary withholding of a syllable, Wiig brilliantly conveys her character's simmering jealousy at the vaulting achievements of her junior.
Those few brief scenes in a long - too long, in fact - film confirm Apatow's status as a formidable comic anthropologist.
That noted, Knocked Up cannot be accounted an unalloyed success. The picture marks yet another episode in a collective effort by the world's film-makers to reduce gender politics to a straight battle between irrational control freaks (that's you, ladies) and boozed up, morally irresponsible infants (burp!). Even those who believe the stereotypes to have value - maybe the world really is one big production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - must admit that such poisonous conflicts do not make for light comedy.
The film is at its best when at its most easygoing. Indeed, the opening half hour suggests we might well have the promised classic on our hands. Seth Rogen, so good as Steve Carell's sidekick in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, stars as Ben, the bulkiest member of a gang of stoned Canadians currently doing very little in Los Angeles. One drunken night he bumps into Alison (Katherine Heigl), who has recently secured a job as a TV presenter, and, after a degree of amusing banter, they stumble back to her house and do what people do in such situations.
Some weeks later, Alison discovers herself pregnant. Ben's initial reaction to the news comprises two words, the second of which is "off", but, after going through all five stages of grief, he eventually comes round to the idea.
As the pregnancy progresses, the tone becomes darker, not least because the brutal tussle between Debbie (Leslie Mann), Alison's sister, and her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd), gets dragged kicking and spitting into the foreground. Debbie (shriek!) has Pete (burp!) so cowed he is terrified to admit he attends a fantasy baseball league with his old buddies.
If this relationship offers
any lessons worth listening to (the fact that Mann is the director's wife chills the blood somewhat), then Ben, Alison and everybody else who think themselves in love may be tiptoeing gaily towards lifelong misery. That combination of gender pigeonholing and incongruous pessimism casts an unwelcome pall over the picture's over-attenuated second hour.
Which is a shame. The banter between Ben's buddies remains hilarious throughout and, despite that suffocating last act, the believable interactions between Rogen and Heigl
make the case for regarding Team Apatow as a significant creative force. They may very well make a comedy for the ages some time soon. Knocked Up is not quite it.
