Forgetting Your Manners: Crude Comedy with Some Heart
By Matt Nathanson | May 5, 2008
Category: The Wasteland
Matt Nathanson reviews the latest Judd Apatow vehicle: Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Ahh, Judd Apatow: the golden boy of dick-jokes. Okay, so the director who helmed The Forty Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up is only a producer here, but his very involvement suggests there is more to this sex comedy than meets the eye. Apatow vehicles are raucous and explosive, comedies where sex – having it, giving it up, making it good, making it great – are the primary preoccupations of the plot. But moreover, Apatow comedies are those where a responsible ethos of common, uncomplicated sweetness is lurking below the raunchy surface and works to excuse—morally speaking—the hormonal misadventures and mistakes of the characters. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is no exception, a comedy where love is tied to sex in a realistic, funny, and symbiotic way. Rarely does a “romantic comedy” take sex so unseriously, and there’s an almost refreshing truth in that casualness. After all, this is a movie whose very first scene exploits full-frontal nudity to hilarious effect (and for a movie that stars Mila Kunis, it is not exactly what many of us were hoping or expecting) yet spends the majority of its next half-hour portraying a full-grown man in tears.
One way to think about Forgetting Sarah Marshall is as a romantic comedy where the man plays the part of the woman. Jason Segel is Peter Bretter, a mopey, doughy television music composer who is dumped in the film’s opening scene. He goes through the familiar post-relationship tap-dance: denial, shock, bargaining, sleeping with everything that has a vagina. Peter is the scorned, the inflicted, the victim: and in those ways he plays the archetypical “female” in this fractured fairy-tale romance. After all, most romantic comedies—starring Meg Ryan and played to a female audience—display a young girl who, scorned by the man she thought she loved, has to overcome her limitations or expectations to find true love (which is often, I can almost hear the movie-trailer voice now, “right where she least expects it”). The message is usually Girl Power!, whether or not the outcome—most typically, the scorned finds another man who will treat her better—really justifies it or not. Here Peter is (almost) unambiguously good. He has done nothing wrong and so we align with him automatically. Sarah, the girl he is trying to forget (played by Kristen Bell), is the philanderer, the cheater, the bitch. It’s Peter who learns the lesson that it takes more than (that) lover to make him the person he is. It’s Girl Power repackaged for the modern man.
And so towards these ends the movie finds a loveable analogy between getting over a bitchy ex-girlfriend and self-actualizing professionally and personally beyond the activities and preoccupations of romance. And while I believe this message (in fact, I’d say it’s part of my personal philosophy) I feel the movie backs off from its courage when it allows Rachel (Mila Kunis)—the “other woman” who helps Peter overcome his obsession with his ex— to re-enter in the final scene. When will a romantic comedy allow that the panacea for soured love isn’t necessarily another girl? Maybe it’s asking a little much of a film whose modus operandi is gay- and dick-jokes, but somehow I expect producer Judd Apatow to offer us something a little more surprising and courageous.
This is true of the movie as a whole, which comes so asymptotically close at points to being unconventional that when the final kiss and pat happy ending ties everything together it’s a little bit of a shock. Perhaps it’s my more iconoclastic inclinations, but seeing the good-hearted-male-with-something-to-learn at last get together with his counterpoint female-who-can-remind-him-how-to-love is somehow just a bit disappointing. A few misplaced, brutally unfunny scenes sort of give false hope that we are getting more than the typical fare. When Sarah approaches Rachel and tells her what a good guy Peter is, there is an extremely nuanced level to both girls’ performances that makes it riveting to watch. But where are the jokes? When Sarah fires back at Peter that she did everything she could have to make their relationship work and that it was his xenophobia and lassitude that eventually wore her done, we are at last getting to something more truthful: Sarah is not only a bitch but she is also a woman, and Peter is not only the scorned-lover but he is also a man. This is the only hint we get of Sarah beyond being the One-Who-Dumped, and, alas, the closest we get to seeing her as a fully fleshed-out character. But where are the jokes?
And so the best parts of Forgetting Sarah Marshall for me were often the least funny and somehow most truthful scenes. I wish there was more of them. Overall, it’s a good addition to the Apatow canon that is– like those girls who are a little more than a one night stand – there in the morning but slowly fade as time goes by and other distractions (other girls…) show up to the beach.
In addition to examining film, television, and books, Matt Nathanson is licensed to review anything in the universe. Like a city. Or a year. Or snow. Matt works in television and is a graduate of Tufts.