Movie Chile Review

This Is 40

By: Jonathan Richards
Published online: Friday, December 21, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), characters spun off from Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007), are turning 40, and their lives are not much fun. Sex can sometimes be good, but just as often not. They have money problems. They have different tastes. They still love each other, but the spark is gone. Mann is Apatow’s wife, and with their two children playing Pete and Debbie’s kids in this movie, it’s no stretch to hazard a guess that Rudd is standing in for Apatow in a story based at least in part on his family life. It may be more about the Apatows than you really want to know. There is a smattering of good laughs in this midlife comedy, but stretched over two hours and a quarter they wear thin. Rated R. 134 minutes.

Full Review

This Is 40, comedy, rated R, Regal Stadium 14, 2 chiles

This Is 40 is a comedy like Raisin Bran is a box of raisins. There is comedy in the mix, there are bursts of wit and ripples of laughter. But scattered through two and a quarter hours of bulk, they don’t provide much nourishment.

Judd Apatow, for better or for worse, seems to be the voice of today’s school of cinematic comedy. He is the Frank Capra of his generation, the Woody Allen, the Mel Brooks. He offers a comic sensibility that reflects the tastes and attitudes of an age. Starting with his debut feature The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he has directed a string of hits and written and produced a much longer string. Apatow sits in the catbird seat of contemporary movie comedy.

Now, with his 40th birthday receding in his rear-view mirror, he has made a reflective midlife comedy that can easily be interpreted as containing at least a few scoops of raisins worth of autobiography. Spinning off from their secondary roles in an earlier Apatow effort, Knocked Up (2007), are Paul Rudd as Pete and Leslie Mann as his wife, Debbie. Mann is Apatow’s real-life wife, and with their two children Iris and Maude play- ing Pete and Debbie’s kids in this movie, it’s no stretch to hazard a guess that Rudd is standing in for Apatow in a story based at least in part on his family life.

The family circus that Apatow shows us is not much fun to be around. The film opens with a sex-in-the- shower scene in which it is revealed that Pete relies on Viagra, and Debbie is as horrified as if he had copped to a venereal disease. It doesn’t get much better after that. The event being celebrated is their mutual 40th birthday, although Debbie will only admit to 38.

Debbie sneaks cigarettes. Pete binges on cupcakes and spends an inordinate amount of time sitting on the toilet with his iPad, playing Scrabble. Toilet humor is something difficult to escape in the Apatow canon. Debbie wants to ban gluten, sugar, and anything else that might be appetizing from their diet. Pete lies naked on the bed with his legs in the air and asks Debbie to inspect him for a hemorrhoid. The magic would seem to be gone from this marriage.

Debbie owns a dress shop where one of her employees is embezzling. Pete has left a record-company job to start his own label. Interestingly, Apatow’s maternal grandfather was the record executive Bob Shad, who produced Charlie Parker, Janis Joplin, Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, the Platters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and many other greats. Things aren’t going as well at Pete’s label. He’s putting most of his effort into promoting a washed-up old rock ’n’ roll icon (Graham Parker) whom nobody wants to hear. Debbie certainly doesn’t. She and Pete seem to have no inkling, after a decade and a half of marriage and his career in the record business, of each other’s musical tastes. (“Lady Gaga?”) They bicker and fight, and at one point Pete, talking with a friend, muses idly on the benefits of being a widower. Debbie wonders if he would have ever married her if she hadn’t been pregnant, and Pete doesn’t have a ready answer.

They don’t relate to their kids much better than they do each other, and the kids (nicely played by the Apatow daughters) roll their eyes and storm off or get into squabbles with each other. It’s all very spontaneous and improvisational, which is depressing in itself, and while it may resonate with intimations of real-life problems, these are the problems you go to the movies to get away from.

They have money worries that are more serious than Debbie realizes and more serious than Pete will admit to. They also have fathers. Pete’s is Albert Brooks, and he’s a mooch who is into his son for about $80,000, a circumstance Pete is hiding from Debbie. Debbie’s father is John Lithgow, who has been absent all her life, dropping in occasionally for a cup of coffee. Both fathers have young wives and children younger than Pete and Debbie’s.

The material is the quotidian angst of a vaguely loving but sparkless marriage, played for jokes, and some of the jokes are funny. But despite Pete and Debbie’s getaway to a spa for a little romantic R & R with a box of hash brownies, they have to come home eventually, and their troubles are all still there.

The movie is strewn with odd cameos, and in one of them, Melissa McCarthy shows up as the deus ex machina inserted to get Pete and Debbie out of their doldrums and focused on a common enemy. Debbie interferes in the social problems of her older daughter at middle school, and a showdown takes place in the principal’s office, with McCarthy as the mother of the girl’s tormentor. It’s a mildly funny, deeply scatological scene, and its improvisational aspect is underlined by an outtake inserted in the film’s end credits, where you get to see what fun they all had coming up with this stuff.

Apatow can be very funny, and maybe now that his bout with 40 is behind him, he can get back to making us laugh.