Review: "Funny People"

In Judd Apatow’s newest directorial effort, and likely his least satisfying, there are many characters, mostly comedians, and tons of dialog. At around 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film feels longer than it is, and changes mood and location countless times. It’s like a dramedy with the pacing of “The Godfather,”and I’m not so sure that it worked all that well.

Funny People is about a middle-aged comedian, George Simmons (Adam Sandler) who makes stupid empty movies for lots of money, lives in a huge empty house, and has a boring, empty life. When informed that he is close to the end of his life because of a rare blood cancer Simmons needs to reach back into his youth. He hires Ira Hill (Seth Rogen) a young comedian  to write jokes for him, and to be his new assistant in an effort to regain some of his feelings from youth. This is clearly Apatow and Sandler crying out to let the world know how depressing being a well paid comedy actor can be, but at the same time, watching all of it on the screen isn’t the most enjoyable experience.

All of Apatow’s films, some of the later “Bromance” flicks, and even the beloved cartoon “South Park” are all good examples of male bonding in the form of jokes and pranks. These films and shows feature cruel pranks, name calling, and generally making fun of a person for the same thing again and again, using creatively different wording every time. It’s all fun and games though, and we, have come to like this playfully mean banter.

There’s not much playfulness in Funny People, unfortunately. It’s more of a mean spirited film, and a lot of sequences suffer because of this. The dialog is fairly clever, the jokes would probably be pretty funny out of context, but it’s like Apatow wanted you to dislike all the characters. Every character can be a jerk to one another, and there’s really no end to it. It’s almost as if some of the characters have no deep emotional feelings whatsoever in one scene, and then in the next the audience is expected to sympathize with their now touchy-feely demeanor.

I don’t know whether or not to blame this on the writing or the direction, both done entirely by Apatow himself. I think what may have happened is that Apatow simply did not understand what the audience would actually think about the events in the movie. Many scenes that clearly have clever one-liners end up falling flat and awkward because of the other person’s reaction. Awkwardness is often a great tool to bring out laughter, but it doesn’t seem to have that effect in this film.

There’s a scene in the movie with a European doctor. Seth Rogen and Sandler make fun of him with a number of Die Hard jokes. The scene is too long and when it’s finally over, the extremely nice doctor is visibly and verbally bothered. You stop laughing once the sequence starts to take on a cruel direction. I think this might’ve just been a misread by Apatow in writing the film. If the same jokes had been spouted at a European body builder, they would’ve been funny the whole time, but in the context of the film they aren’t.

Another example from the trailer is the scene where Jonah Hill tells Jason Schwartzman that he thinks his grandfather’s soul passed through a candle to go to hell not heaven. Is it a clever line? Yes, it is. Apatow is very good with dialog and jokes. Does it fall flat because Schwartzman really was just trying to open up to his two roommates? Yes, it isn’t funny at all in the film.

You could make the argument that this is Apatow’s intention, that he wants you to see the “cruel” side of comedy. And if that’s true then the rant Rogen goes on in the car with Sandler near the end of the film wraps the story up pretty well. Sandler’s character is sad and depressing, but interesting and developed well. It’s a cliché to have a male character who always tried to “live up to his dad’s expectations,” but Apatow uses the cliché to his advantage in an interesting line about the difference between the comedians of Sandler’s generation and younger generations. Sandler (as big comedy star “George Simmons”) is a tortured soul who isn’t ready to die, but who isn’t ready to start living his life again either. He’s stuck in a past relationship and has never moved on, only having lots of empty sex for the past twenty odd years. That’s not too original either and Apatow borrowed a good chunk of Sandler himself (although he’s happily married with a child) and Apatow utilized Sandler’s rise to fame and the types of films he normally produces in “Funny People”. His character works alright, but he’s definitely a selfish bastard, and because of that, he’s hard to like.

Its okay not liking Sandler’s character as a person because the film has so many; the other characters should redeem the film, right? Not really. For example, Seth Rogen’s character is probably one of the least interesting. He’s insanely nice, but he’s almost not that likeable because he’s so helpless. He has no backbone, and even when he seems to grow one at the end, he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He’s often clueless, and a lot of the time it feels like he’s so nice and non-descript that he doesn’t have much of a personality at all.
Jonah Hill’s small part in the movie, playing up and coming comedian, “Leo Koenig”, is pretty typical of him. He just kind of spouts profanities and points out every mistake or problem someone might have, while caring anyone  but himself. It’s almost the same part that he had in “Superbad”, but smaller, and obviously a lot less fresh. He doesn’t add all that much value to the film, and only seems to be there for a little added name power with teens. Jason Schwartzman playing “Mark Taylor Jackson” is yet another douche bag comedian in “Funny People” who scored a part on a stupid hit T.V. show called “Yo Teach!”, and is always bragging about his sizeable paychecks to his roommates, Hill and Rogen.
Finally, Apatow’s wife, Leslie Mann as “Laura” plays the love of George Simmons’s life, the girl that got away, and Eric Bana plays her husband “Clarke.” Now you see a conflict in the sub-plot there. Mann doesn’t do much new, but she plays the cute but crazy middle-aged woman very well. Eric Bana might have the best part in the whole movie. He isn’t an extremely well developed character, but he certainly has the best personality, and he actually exhibits real human emotions with a believable range.
One of my biggest complaints about “Funny People”is that the penis jokes get VERY old. The film is serious and dark, and expects you to take it seriously, but the material doesn’t do the same. When a character isn’t quite sure what to say, they’ll generally say something that has to do with a penis.
 “Knocked Up” is near to my heart as one of the most likeable comedies ever made, and “The 40-Year Old Virgin” was hysterical in my first few viewings, but “Funny People” is a hard film to judge. If Apatow was trying to make a film about how the world of comedy is not a fun place to be, then he succeeded, but I’m not so sure the film entertains the way he’d like it to. Like so many other filmmakers before him, this slow moving passion project will not satisfy viewers as well as his mega-hits did before it. He was clearly way too attached to the film, and was trying to tell a story a little too close to his own heart.
There are a lot of cameos in this film, but “Funny People” is still missing something. While I said the film was too close to its filmmaker’s heart, it is lacking just that. Its fairly positive final moments do lead you to believe there is some hope for young dreamers out there who long to be stand-up comics; the film is still pretty negative. Its characters can be mean and narcissistic, and a lot of the nicer characters in the film get stomped on “Funny People” is one of two things; it’s either a decent, but overlong “dramedy”, or it is the ultimate “self-hate” masterpiece on the part of all the comedians involved in the making of the film, particularly its mastermind, Apatow. Which one is up to you, but my decision is somewhere in the middle.

Rating - 6/10

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