This is 40 (2012) ***/*****
Coming off his critically acclaimed and criminally short-lived TV series, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, Judd Apatow started off his career as a feature film director with quite a bit of hype and plenty of good tidings. A funny thing has happened now that he’s a few films into said career though. These days you can’t find a review of an Apatow film that doesn’t sound like a lecture aimed directly at the director; like a scolding of him as if he were a child. “Your movies are too long, Judd,” they shout. “You need to be willing to edit out some of your material, even if it’s good stuff,” they admonish. Why the sudden shift in tone between everyone being Apatow fanboys and everyone being Apatow antagonists? Because the guy needs to listen to his damn critics and stop making movies that are so damn long!
The reason Apatow’s last few films — somewhat Knocked Up, more than anything Funny People, and certainly this new film, This is 40 — are so danged frustrating is that there are so many heartwarmingly relatable moments and gutbustingly hilarious moments in them, they should be real classics. But they get bogged down by so much extra stuff that, by the time you get to the end credits, you feel like you’ve been fed to bursting and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get out of your chair and get the hell away from his characters.
This time around we’re revisiting Pete and Debbie, the more experienced couple from Knocked Up who were played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. With Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s characters shunted off to who knows where, they get the focus. As you might guess, this movie is all about what happens to couples as they enter their forties. What happens when the newness of being a family has worn off? What do you do when it starts to feel like you’ve been trapped in a life, and you’re not even certain how you got there? Are you really locked in to being bonded to the person across from you until one of you dies? Is the place you’re at in your career now really the furthest you’re going to get? Does life ever stop being a struggle and allow you to slip into a comfort zone? The answer seems to be no. At least, if you’re as unreasonable a couple of people as Pete and Debbie.
Before we get into the stuff about this story that’s annoying though, let’s take some time to focus on what actually does work. First off, marriage is an absolutely terrifying prospect, and there are few films out there that are able to paint a more accurate picture of why that is than This is 40. To marry someone isn’t just to be faithful to them for the rest of your life, often it’s to give them a say in what you do for the rest of your life. What you say, what you like, what you eat… it all reflects on them, so they get a vote. Many people in marriages monitor where the other person is and what they’re doing, at all times. This sort of lack of privacy and individuality has Pete and Debbie lying to each other, spying on each other, and generally treating the other like they’re the enemy. To name drop all of the moments in This is 40 that make you bite your knuckle and go, “oh no, that is what a marriage that’s creeping up on 20 years would look like,” would take too long, because this is an Apatow movie, and, of course, there are too many of them. The first couple really feel like revelations, the last dozen just make Pete and Debbie look like bad people.
This is 40 is full of hilarious quips and gags as well. Seeing as the cast features names like Albert Brooks, Melissa McCarthy, Jason Segel, Chris O’Dowd, and John Lithgow, in addition to having Rudd and Mann in the lead roles, that should come as no surprise. Every time Tom Petty gets mentioned, it absolutely kills. A crack involving John Goodman gets maybe the biggest laugh of the movie. And a subplot involving J.J. Abrams consistently provides a steady stream of laughs throughout. This being an Apatow movie, the cast seems to have been given plenty of opportunity to riff off script and see what would come up naturally, and, as you would imagine, there are too many jokes that land in here to even begin to catalogue them. But, once again, this being an Apatow movie, far more of these jokes get included than should. After two hours of laughing it kind of gets hard to keep laughing. We’re not distance runners here, we’re a movie audience, please have some mercy on us.
Now let’s talk about the stuff in This is 40 that doesn’t work. First off, there are some quibbles to be had with the relatability of these characters. Not only do they act too careless toward each other too often, but there is also a disturbing trend in Apatow’s projects that sees them being less about normal people and more about Hollywood types. His work in TV focused on regular people from Middle America, and slowly his characters have morphed into solely being showbiz types from Los Angeles. Pete and Debbie’s kids are going to some sort of yuppie white person school where the parents are super-involved that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Everyone here has some sort of glamorous job in show business or something artsy. The characters rub elbows with players on professional hockey teams and famous musicians, which makes it necessary for a bunch of non-actors to show up on screen and deliver painfully amateur line-readings (Though none are as bad as Apatow’s youngest daughter, who gets a ton of lines here and can’t deliver any of them without cheesing and winking at the camera. If one wanted to get mean they could write a whole essay on nepotism and how the plethora of unacceptable line readings in this movie prove a director’s children don’t belong in front of the camera), and which doesn’t accomplish anything other than making you feel like you’re watching something about people who are different than you. Apatow’s early work — and the stuff that works the best here — is successful because of his ability to create authentic moments that relate intimately to your own experiences — and it’s starting to look like he’s in danger of losing that.
The biggest problem with this movie though, is that it’s a bloated and unwieldy 134 minutes, and it isn’t structured well enough to keep its pacing up to the finish line, or even to somewhere close enough to the finish line. The first act does a great job of establishing where everyone is and what the various problems they’re wrestling with are, but after that things start to meander. There’s never really a clear path of where everyone is going, what the crisis point for each character is going to be, or what they might do in order to overcome their issues. Pete and Debbie just plow through their lives, being miserable and making jokes about misery, with no end in sight. The characters get explored, but a story never really gets told.
There’s a birthday party in the third act that manages to encapsulate everything that’s wrong with the movie. It goes on forever, to the point where it even contains its own subplots. Characters that don’t have anything to do with each other have funny but non-essential interactions that don’t have anything to do with the main plot of Pete and Debbie’s dissolving relationship. And the misery just builds and builds until Rudd’s character runs off, finally creates a concrete conflict that needs to get resolved, and then resolves it, all in the span of about ten minutes — just so this long, rambling, mess of a story can create an ending for itself. This movie is Knocked Up if nobody got pregnant. What’s the story? Where would you even decide to end things? Who knows!
Yes, picking on Apatow for making movies that are too long is starting to get old hat, but it’s going to continue because of how clearly talented he is and because of how much great stuff he’s able to produce, even in movies that don’t totally work. It’s frustrating! There is a completely awesome hour-and-forty-minute movie somewhere in the two-hours-and-fifteen-minute movie that is This is 40, but that movie gets crushed under its own weight and a lot of the good stuff gets forgotten. Apatow has said that the first cut of this film was around three-and-a-half hours, and that’s just ridiculous. What did that script look like? Why would anyone plan a family dramedy that could possibly get that long? If Apatow would try, just as an experiment, to write a script that’s under 150 pages, and then actually shoot that script… who knows what the results would be. It would definitely be the best thing he’s made in a while though. And what would happen if he got shunted back to having to work in the strict 44 minute storytelling structure of television? A dream! Somebody get a handle on this juggernaut of talent and rein him in already.
