Film review
The evolution of the adolescent, summer, R-rated comedy continues apace. First, there was Porky’s, then American Pie and now Knocked Up. I must say there is some hope for the genre-species.
Knocked Up is Judd Apatow’s follow-up to The 40 Year Old Virgin. Average, kinda-heavy dude Ben Stone (Seth Rogen, who was Steve Carrell’s wise-cracking buddy in Virgin) lives with four slacker buddies in a kind of halfway house for college students and unemployed young adults. The lads are more of less working on a website, featuring the nude scenes of every actress known to man. Imagine their chagrin when they find out a much more sophisticated website already exists. Oh well.
Grey’s Anatomy actress Katherine Heigl is Alison, an aspiring TV personality. She’s smart, cute and successful. She would never hook up with a slacker like Ben-unless Demon Rum works its magic. Even Ben looks kind of cute when viewed with liquor goggles. An evening of excess concludes in a one-night tryst, followed by the inevitable, awkward next morning, filled with embarrassment and shame.
Eight weeks later, Alison is pregnant. Instead of getting an abortion, Alison decides to keep the baby and informs Ben, who is completely unprepared for fatherhood but wants to do the right thing. Their relationship evolves as Alison gets bigger and bigger. Alison’s older sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann, who is Apatow’s wife), and her husband, Pete (Paul Rudd), and their two daughters present the very funny vision of Ben and Alison’s parental future. Pete observes that “marriage is like Everybody Loves Raymond except that it’s not funny.”
At 2 hours and 6 minutes, Knocked Up is probably a little bit too long. There’s a trip that Ben and Paul take to Las Vegas that could have been cut, but there are lots of laugh-out-loud funny scenes. All the scenes with the edgy sister Debbie are great, especially one where the pushing-40 Debbie and the very pregnant Alison are turned away from a hot spot club. All the minor characters are not just background. They make the movie better.
I will say that it struck me as extremely unlikely that a hot girl like Alison would ever see anything in a nerd like Ben, but my wife did marry me, so I guess it’s not completely impossible. But still.
A few cautionary notes. The movie is really for people under 40. There are lots of cultural references that I would not have gotten as a 58-year-old, but for more periodic viewing of Entertainment Tonight (hey, it beats Wheel of Fortune). Also, the humor is often raunchy, and there is a borderline disturbing scene when Alison is delivering-unless, of course, you’re a gynecologist.
A preacher once said, “You don’t have to be what you have become”. Ben is a going-nowhere slacker, and Alison is an ambitious job-striver until Ben impregnates her. That event transforms them, or at least forces them to think about what each of them values. Although this raunchy sex comedy is on the surface just another summer diversion, there is at its core a sweetness, even inspiration, that maybe we are all a little better than we seem.
