Not Knocked Out by ‘Knocked Up’

The bandwagon started rolling quietly enough: an early profile in TIME about its barely known star, very enthusiastic reviews, and an opening box office weekend that outperformed analysts’ estimates. Knocked Up, a comedy about a young career woman (Katherine Heigl) who finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with a chubby stoner (Seth Rogen), finished its first three days at $30.7 million — which happened to be, almost exactly, the movie’s very modest budget. That number was enough to make the film a sturdy second last weekend to the mega-threequel Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which took in $44.2 million. But as the Depp ship was running aground, Knocked Up was gaining mo. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, it took in more money than Pirates did.

These could be the legs of a comedy hit on the order of There’s Something About Mary, the Farrelly Brothers romantic farce that lingered near the top of the box office heap all summer of 1998, finally made the No. 1 slot in its ninth week, earned $176 million in North America and (rare for a comedy) even more abroad, and won Cameron Diaz a Best Actress citation from the New York Film Critics Circle. Knocked Up could do even better, based on the rapturous reviews — the most favorable of any mainstream movie this year, according to the Rotten Tomatoes website. I wouldn’t be amazed if, at the end of this year, Knocked Up were to win a few critics’ awards for best film.

But right now, for Judd Apatow’s slacker romantic comedy, it’s beginning to smell a lot like Zeitgeist. (Which in this case has underodors of bong smoke and turd jokes.) Maureen Dowd, the New York Times‘ ageless arbiter of sexual politics, weighed in with a column on the movie. So did just about everyone who writes for The Huffington Post. Yesterday I received a promotion for a 1982 Eastern European art film that the publicist ID’d as “‘Knocked Up,’ Polish style.” And there’s the lawsuit from the author of a humorous memoir called Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be. Rebecca Eckler, whom Booklist describes as “Canada’s answer to Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell,” claims suspicious similarities between the movie and her book, which was submitted to several Hollywood producers after its publication two years ago. Apatow denies the charges.

But the buzz is resonating beyond official circles. In the last few days my friends and I have heard people talking about the film in restaurants and museums, at parties and on the subway. This is not just the kind of movie that will get people seeing it to catch up with the tastemaker crowd; it’s the uncommoner kind that will lure people who, given what they’ve heard, are expecting to hate it. They’ll see it so they can join the debate, if only to say It wasn’t that good.

Here’s where I have to say: It isn’t that good. Not quite “an instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching,” as the Times’ Tony Scott opined (in, I have to add, a brilliantly written review). Nor can I agree with the declaration of my friend Richard Schickel, here on TIME.com, that “Apatow, represents, for the moment at least, the best in American movie comedy … a throwback to the kind of screenwriters who created the classic romantic comedies of the 1930s.”

Watching the movie with a theater full of actual paying customers (who gave every indication of enjoying themselves), I laughed here and there, didn’t build up a raging animosity. But I was very much on the outside of the experience. I felt like an entomologist observing some strange, yet strangely familiar new species. Then I realized what I was seeing: a 1930s movie in contemporarily grungy garb. And I don’t mean that as a compliment to Knocked Up — that it has a clever plot or dazzling dialogue. Long ago I wrote a book on Hollywood screenwriters (the 1974 Talking Pictures), and in that spirit I have one or two tuts to tut.

Knocked Up is, essentially, a rich-girl-poor-boy romantic comedy, of the kind Hollywood manufactured by the hundreds in its glamorous, sexually restrictive prime. Back then, an unmarried woman with a baby would usually be the victim of mistaken identity. Ginger Rogers, say, in the 1939 Bachelor Mother: she notices an abandoned infant outside an orphanage, gathers the child up and is thought to be its mother; comic discomfort ensues. On rare occasions, and with back-breaking dexterity, a gifted writer could work the sex act into a movie’s plot. Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek: on a one-night stand, a pretty young blond gets drunk and pregnant, and drags her very unsuitable boyfriend along to help her cope with the consequences. Hilarity, at breakneck speed and daredevil heights, ensues.

The difference back then, kids, was the iron-clad code of behavior imposed on movie characters. No sexual union without marriage was condoned; no woman blithely chose to have a child out of wedlock; abortion (or, as it’s delicately alluded to in Knocked Up, “shmuh-shmortion”) was not considered, not even discussed. Considering all the strictures on what was allowed in movies, we marvel at the ingenuity of writers to confect situations that satisfied audiences then, and still delight us today, if only in their gleaming artificiality.

Apatow labors under none of those caveats. Marriage is an option, not a command, for couples living together; nearly 40% of all babies born in 2005 had unmarried mothers; more than a million legal abortions are performed each year in the U.S. So Apatow, like all modern comedy writers, has another challenge: how to create social and ethical barriers — the ones the old screenwriters relied on for their characters to hurdle — when few exist. His tactic: rebuild the old barriers. If those hobbling conventions worked for the old masters, they might be worth resuscitating.

ALISON’S WONDERLAND

Take the Heigl character, Alison. In her mid-20s, she is smart, pretty and nice. She has a good job, that’s getting better, at the E! Channel. And where does this independent achiever live? Why, in the home of her married sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), with Debbie’s husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and their two kids. Apatow imagines that, in Los Angeles 2007, there’s some time-warp housing-shortage like the one in World War II-era Washington, D.C. — the premise for the 1943 comedy The More the Merrier.

As for Rogen’s Ben Stone, he lives with a bunch of dopers so louche they make him seem almost normal. Yes, Ben’s friends are descendants of Cheech & Chong and Bill & Ted; but they go back even further, to the all-male enclave inhabited by Gary Cooper and his professorial pals in the 1941 Ball of Fire. Both groups were involved in compiling a reference work: an encyclopedia from the Ball of Fire scholars and, from Ben’s housemates, a scheme for a website that will itemize the nude scenes of movie actresses. This is an idea so perfect for the Internet that it actually precedes it: Craig Hosoda published his first edition of The Bare Facts Video Guide in the late 80s. The notion was later adapted for the Internet as the Mr. Skin site. Would the Ben-guys not have known of such a site? Are they pretending they have a project so they can watch movies of naked ladies? The answer, again: Because it’s a movie.

To celebrate a promotion at E!, Alison takes Debbie to a club; she meets Ben, they get drunk, have sex. etc. Eight weeks later, she suspects she’s pregnant. Hmmm: at just the moment when she’s been promoted to being an on-air reporter, she gets knocked up by a loser she barely knows and, when sober, can’t stand. Some women would terminate the pregnancy. Alison doesn’t, because … because then there would be no movie — at least, not the kind Apatow wants to make. (Suggestion for an edgier romantic comedy. Two unsuited people get together, girl gets pregnant, has abortion, then decides she likes the guy, and they set about raising a family of kids they really want.)

Having chosen to bring the baby to term, Alison now has to figure out whether she brings Ben into the equation. In such a dilemma, whom can she confide in? You might expect that such a personable sort would have a circle of women friends — what Apatow would call her pussy posse — but not Alison. All right, no girlfriends. But she’s got an infotainment job in L.A.; the place must be swarming with gay men, ready to offer their sympathy or tart wisdom. In show business, isn’t there a Will for every Grace? No again; Alison is effectively friendless. In the old movies, the heroine was often isolated by convention or prejudice. Here, Apatow strands Alison is in order to make the unthinkable Ben an attractive, indeed the only, choice.

Alison’s one sounding board is Debbie, who has issues of her own. In a word, she’s a bitch. Ben’s friends might diagnose Debbie’s condition as a severe case of PMS, and they wouldn’t be far off, if the P is for Perpetual. She hardly tries to conceal her hatred of men, and her husband in particular: “I get worse-looking and he gets better-looking. It’s so unfair.” Her theory of getting men to do a woman’s bidding — “You criticize them a lot, and then they get so down on themselves that they change” — sounds like extreme rendition. At one point she freaks out in exasperation at Pete: “I wanna rip your f—ing head off because you’re so f—ing stupid!” Yet Debbie is the person who’s meant to represent all domestic options for Alison, beyond sticking with Ben.

I know. Debbie has to be a shrew, and her marriage with Pete a sad charade, to give Alison one more hurdle to jump: that she’ll wonder if living with anyone, let alone Ben, is doomed to failure. But here’s a little tip to budding screenwriters. If your refutation to questions of plot irregularity is “Because it’s a movie!” — and especially if that card has to be played more than a few times (no friends, no abortion, supporting characters who are caricatures, a website subplot that collapses on closer inspection) — then maybe your script has plausibility problems.

As much as Knocked Up hates Debbie (who’s played by Apatow’s real-life wife!), that’s how much it loves her husband Pete — the film’s idea of Married Man. Pete is cute and funny, he loves his bratty kids so much he gets soupy-poetic over watching them blow bubbles. He does (in maybe my favorite moment in the film) a devastating DeNiro impression. Most heroically, he tolerates his numbing marriage to super-bitch Debbie. “Marriage,” he tells Ben, “is like that show Everybody Loves Raymond. Except it’s not funny.”

Not that Pete can stand being with her and the kids all the time. He gives bogus excuses and sneaks out at night, not to have an affair, as his wife suspects, but to take part in a fantasy baseball draft — which outrages her more. You’re cheating on me to get freaking companionship? she asks. Am I not enough? The movie’s answer: No, you are not; no one person is. Nobody can be everything to anybody.

GUY-NECOLOGY

That sounds fairly mature. And in fact it’s more mature than the movie, which, whatever its ostensible message of love between two improbable strangers, is a celebration of male camaraderie, and how guys need to do their guy stuff. That too is a theme with an honorable movie history: in the snappy bravado of heroes in Howard Hawks westerns, the desperate friendship in war-movie foxholes, the sass and sarcasm exchanged by slobby Oscar and his poker pals in The Odd Couple. It exists in real life, too, of course, in less appealing ways than Knocked Up lets on. The old cliché, of construction workers giving out with the wolf whistle at women walking by their site, has become the new one, of slackers avidly calibrating the activities of movie actresses in the nude.

In Knocked Up, the camaraderie is mainly comic. Guys topping guys — men amusing themselves and one another by competing in a kind of verbal bowling tournament — is as old as the Friars Club, as familiar as The Man Show (actually a favorite of mine, in its early Comedy Central years), as intense and obscene as The Aristocrats. It’s also the ribald companionship of the sitcom writing room, a basically male preserve where the scribes often engage in sexually explicit jokes about the show’s cast, as an assistant copies it all down. (In 1999 one such assistant, Amaani Lyle of the Friends staff, brought a sexual discrimination suit against the writers for burning her ears with their X-rated gags.) Apatow is a veteran of these rooms, from his own shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, and some of that rowdy zazz gets into his movies.

His previous film as writer-director, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, was supposed to be about how a nice fellow who’d never managed to have sex triumphs over the prodding and baiting of his jerky friends (including Rogen and Rudd) and finds a compatible mate. But The Girl (Catherine Keener) was hardly a character at all; her only function was to unleash a hearty laugh whenever Carell passed a joke. Alison, granted, is more prominent and complicated here. But for all the lip service Apatow pays to the guy-gal plot of Knocked Up, he invests much more energy and affection in the scenes of Ben with his friends and, emphatically, with Pete — who is the one person in the movie Ben really falls for. It’s another old plot: beauty and the beast.

Unlike some of this movie’s skeptics, I don’t mind Rogen. He has sweet eyes, a voice too deep and rich for his age and, in his one nude scene (Heigl doesn’t get one, as Mr. Skin will tell you, except for a gynecological closeup late in the film) a cute tush. But by Hollywood beauty standards, he’s so on the lower side of ordinary, he almost doesn’t belong in movies. That’s one good thing about Apatow: he subverts the medium’s inherent aesthetic fascism — survival of the cutest — and puts funny people center-screen. His mission to devolve the notion of the leading man continues in this fall’s Rogen-Apatow comedy Superbad, which will star Jonah Hill, next to whom Rogen is Redford. Meanwhile, the very presentable Rudd, whom Apatow keeps casting as the hero’s best friend, has yet to get a lead role. It’s like Bizarro-World Goes to Hollywood.

But Rudd in Knocked Up is Ben’s humane, hunky alternative to his lower-life-form friends, and a closer soulmate than Alison. He can’t have sex with Pete, but Alison can’t make him laugh so hard — which is what matters in a guy-centric comedy. Ben is tolerant of Alison’s weaknesses but attracted to Ben’s strengths. He’s not the Other, which guys like Ben think of women; he’s the better, cooler Ben. At the film’s climax, the two go off to Vegas, again not to have sex but to do some “shrooms” and make each other giggle. Ben and Alison are the odd couple, but in Ben and Pete the movie has found its ideal couple.

Ending the story there would make Knocked Up not only consistent with the male-male romances that stock so many Hollywood movies (check my reviews of 300, Blades of Glory and Spider-Man 3 for extensive notes on this trend) but a more honest parable. Instead, in the middle of their stoned bliss, the guys decide to go back home: Pete to his loveless marriage, Ben to the foxy lady who somehow wants him to be the father of their child. Comic birth scene and declarations of love ensue.

Why does this happen? For the last time, because it’s a movie. And not a very good one.