Forgetting Sarah Marshall
by M. Faust
Don’t look now, but Judd Apatow is taking over.
In the 12-month period ending this summer, he will have been a force behind six feature films, all of them hits or likely to be. If you could buy stock in the guy, he’d be the best investment around.
Apatow has only actually directed two films, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. But as a producer and writer, he has left his distinctive mark on such films as Anchorman, Superbad, and The Cable Guy, and television series like The Larry Saunders Show, The Critic, Undeclared, and the cult classic Freaks and Geeks.
The secret of his success is that Apatow not only likes to develop like-minded ensembles with a penchant toward improvisational work, he also cultivates them into doing more work of their own. Seth Rogan, who wrote Superbad, got his start in the casts of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. So did Jake Kasdan, who went from directing episodes of Freaks and Geeks to the films Thank You For Smoking and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
It would be slighting them to call them simply Apatow acolytes. But Apatow has clearly created a kind of group style that is both willing to absorb new talent and to spin it off to carry on the tradition.
Watch the trailer for "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"
Forgetting Sarah Marshall was written by the actor Jason Segel, who was the lovelorn wannabe drummer Nick on Freaks and Geeks (a show you should, incidentally, watch on DVD first chance you get). It was directed by Nicholas Stoller, who worked on Undeclared.
Inevitably (they don’t make movies about happy couples) Sarah breaks up with him, and he is completely unable to get back into the swing of dating. Meaningless sex substitutes for a while, but doesn’t dampen his depression. (We can tell he’s depressed from the way he looks at their old photo albums on his computer while listening to Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”)
Finally he decides to take a spur of the moment vacation to Hawaii. Picking a hotel at random, he’s shocked to find that Sarah is also there, with her new boyfriend, British rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). A ridiculous coincidence? Sure. But the point of the movie is to make comic hay with the notion of a guy who can’t get over his ex, and to do that it needs him in a position where he can’t get away from her. The script could have spent time devising a more plausible way to throw them together, but why waste the time?
If you’ve seen Segel before, you’ll realize that he has had some experience with this kind of character. He’s incongruously tall and puppyish, with a hangdog expression that seems glum even in happy moments, as if he’s frightened that fate is just setting him up to pull the rug out from under his feet.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has all the Apatow trademarks: sex, nudity, emotion, and silliness. It’s by no means as raunchy as either Knocked Up or Superhad, but neither does it back away from sex as an element of humor. It has lots of characters played by performers who clearly had some input into their roles, including Apatow regulars Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, and Jonah Hill. Jack McBrayer and Maria Thayer are funny as a newlywed couple with compatibility issues. The discovery of the movie is Brand, a popular British comedian who oozes companionable unctuousness as the leather-pantsed rock star for whom Sarah left Peter.
It’s a slight movie, more concerned with funny moments than any grand design. Director Stoller devotes no more time than is absolutely necessary to plot mechanics: In between Peter’s decision to go to Hawaii and his arrival at the desk of the hotel are no scenes of him boarding an airplane. To that end, Hawaii makes the perfect setting: You don’t have to worry about building sets, and if a funny idea occurs to you you can just shoot it, secure in the knowledge that the backing will take care of itself. Some of it is crude, sloppy, or even lazy. But it made me laugh out loud more often than any other film I’ve seen this year (wait for the scene when Peter performs a song for his personal project.)
I can’t wait to see what Apatow has next month.
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