The premise of Knocked Up—a guy and a girl hook up for a one-night stand, except the girl gets pregnant—may not sound like anything special, but it’s actually kind of brilliant.
Most contemporary romantic comedies try as hard as they can to keep their two leads apart, often inventing elaborate, ridiculous and ultimately frustrating contrivances simply to keep them from getting together until the end of the movie. Knocked Up, on the other hand, begins with the couple going to bed—which means the movie can then focus on their attempts to forge a relationship with each other, exactly the messy, agonizing, compromise-filled, non-magical, non-predestined-by-fate part of romance that almost every other movie compulsively avoids dealing with.
And also, most contemporary comedies about pregnancy hinge on the man’s fear that he “won’t be a good father” to his newborn son. There may be a lot of jokes about the torment of crying babies and poopy diapers in these movies, but they all assume a certain inherently noble outlook on the part of the male characters—they recognize the necessity of stepping up to this important social role and worry only about falling short of it despite their very best efforts.
Knocked Up is so refreshingly different, it’s almost radical. When Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), an unemployed stoner living illegally in L.A. while half-heartedly setting up a nude-celebrities website with his similarly undermotivated buddies, learns that he’s going to become a father, his heart sinks. The last thing he wants to do with his life is take on any kind of responsibility, let alone one as permanent as a child. But at least Alison, the mother (Katherine Heigl, from Grey’s Anatomy), is hot—maybe, Ben figures, he can get her to sleep with him a few more times. After all, he can’t get her any more pregnant.
Like writer/director Judd Apatow’s previous film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up appears to be nothing more a raunchy sex comedy, but is in fact a surprisingly resonant parable about men who must finally, as we all have to eventually, leave their cocoon of prolonged adolescence and enter the first mature romance of their entire lives. It’s no coincidence that the turning point in both movies occurs when the heroes finally sell off all their junky memorabilia: their action figures, their bongs, the crappy, cheaply framed movie posters. And Apatow films both sequences with unusual poignancy—did he have to go through this purging process himself? If so, he came through it all right—his daughters Iris and Maude have small parts in the film, and not only are they cute, but they’ve also got fantastic comic timing.
Knocked Up is a starmaking vehicle for Seth Rogen, who’s sort of like the ideal outcome of an experiment to put Woody Allen’s self-deprecating Jewish humour in the body of a pudgy pothead. But he’s only part of the film’s vast comic ensemble, many of whom worked with Rogen and Apatow on Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared and The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel and Martin Starr play Ben’s buddies and deliver some of the funniest, most natural-sounding dudes-hanging-out insult humour ever put on film; Paul Rudd is Heigl’s brother-in-law, an A&R guy for a record label trapped in a spirit-sucking marriage; Loudon Wainwright III even shows up as Ben and Alison’s gynecologist.
There are so many funny people in the cast that you get the feeling Apatow couldn’t bear to cut any of them out—hence the film’s somewhat bloated more than two-hour running time. But all these bits give the film a texture that most romantic comedies lack, a sense that everyone onscreen has something interesting going on in their lives, not just the two leads. Even the tiny parts get to be funny too—Charlyne Yi and Kirsten Wiig get huge laughs with practically every line of dialogue Apatow hands them.
I wish Apatow had chosen a different job for Alison than doing interviews for the E! channel—all those self-deprecating celebrity cameos seem to belong to another movie. And he can’t quite figure out how to modulate the character of Alison’s shrewish but not unsympathetic sister Debbie. The ending is way too tidy, and the climactic sequence with Alison giving birth at the hospital feels, perhaps inevitably, like something we’ve seen on 100 sitcoms already.
Except, of course, for the three shots of the baby’s head crowning just before the final push. That’s the Apatow touch: sex, plus heart, plus crowning shots. It’s hard to think of a more winning combination.
0 Yorumlar