Knocked Up
I found the previews for Knocked Up to be as uninteresting as those for The 40 Year Old Virgin. Both movies from writer/director Judd Apatow, however, are far better than their superficial premises make them appear. Steve Carrell, who starred in Virgin and has a cameo in Knocked Up accurately described the former as a romantic comedy disguised as a sex comedy. Knocked Up follows in that same vein. Following a drunken one-night stand, gorgeous TV entertainment reporter Alison (Katherine Heigl) finds herself pregnant from slacker and stoner Ben Stone (Seth Rogan). Ben and his housemates, when they aren’t high, spend their time watching R-rated movies to document the nudity for their planned entry into the dot-com game. But the obvious mismatch between Ben and Alison is just the window dressing on a movie that goes unflinchingly but humorously to the anxieties, compromises, tensions, and occasional romance at the core of most relationships. Alison’s older sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd) provide the example for what could await Ben and Alison. Superficially, Debbie and Pete have the American dream: two adorable kids and a nice house in the suburbs. Apatow’s script shows the day-to-day grind underneath the facade as Debbie struggles with her perceived lack of sex appeal and Pete struggles with finding a balance between family and job obligations and his desire to hang out with his buddies.
Like Virgin, Knocked Up is an adult comedy, not so much because of the R-rated language, but because the humor is aimed squarely at those who have the adult experience of a long-term relationship or marriage. Some scenes where Debbie and Pete struggle with the accumulation of stress from their family life reminded me of Judy Davis’s and Kevin Spacey’s acerbic verbal sparring in The Ref. I didn’t laugh as much at Knocked Up as at Virgin, but in the ways it deals with men and women coming to terms with each other it is a more satisfying movie. Next Apatow movie, I’ll ignore the previews.