(he likes it)

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/08/03/090803crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=all

The professional comics in Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” come across as a talented but slightly damaged race—a race apart. They hang out together, try out their material on one another, turn their relationships and friendships into jokes and routines. They never stop being comics, and most of their talk is hostile and filthy—that’s the style in which their invention flourishes. (In front of an audience, it’s also the style that gets the laughs.) “Funny People,” a serious comedy about a funny man’s brush with death, is Apatow’s richest, most complicated movie yet—a summing up of his feelings about comedy and its relation to the rest of existence. The movie has passages of uneasy brilliance and many incidental pleasures. It was clear from “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” that Apatow was generous with actors, and in “Funny People” he’s a master showman, displaying the talents of his favorite players—Adam Sandler, Leslie Mann, Seth Rogen, and Jonah Hill—as well as of many other comics. The movie is filled with cameos, none of them gratuitous: Sarah Silverman has a strange, libidinous bit; aging local heroes of the L.A. club scene, their faces like Greek masks (these men couldn’t be anything but entertainers), express something of their essence in a line or two. Apatow gives all these people their moment without losing his grip on the story or his own skepticism. Comics are heroes to him, but their heroism may have cut them off from the kind of life he believes in.

Apatow, who both wrote and directed, sets “Funny People” at two social and professional levels. At the lower level, in an L.A. apartment filled with posters of past comedy stars, Mark (Jason Schwartzman) dangles his first serious paychecks from a sitcom in front of his impoverished roommates, Ira (Seth Rogen) and Leo (Jonah Hill), two zaftig young men who do an occasional ten minutes of standup at a local club. The three men’s friendship is, to put it mildly, barbed. At the upper level, George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a former standup comic who has made a fortune in the movies, lives alone in a mansion by the Pacific in Malibu. The lugubrious house, with its Mission-Victorian heaviness, bears no relation to who George is: he pads around in a T-shirt, as if he were a teen-ager hanging out in a bizarrely oversized basement. George’s career arc overlaps with Sandler’s, so part of the fascination of the movie is speculating how much of the character is based on Sandler, how much not. (To begin with, Sandler is married and has two kids.) Friendless and prickly, George has an occasional generous impulse, but most of the time he’s abrupt and egotistical—hard-shelled and self-serving in the way of longtime celebrities who know how to control their world. He needs to be adored, and he’ll banter with fans, but his face goes dead when a tribe of paparazzi or even an agent comes near.

As in previous movies written and directed or produced by Apatow, there’s a quarrelsome male bond at the center of “Funny People.” But this time the combat is never just patter and taunt. George is suffering from a rare form of leukemia. He looks and feels awful, but he responds to bad news as a comic, by mocking the German accent of an earnestly helpful doctor. Then he begins a slow withdrawal from his life. He sets Ira up in the Malibu house (he has seen some of his act at a local club) and makes him his joke writer, flunky, punching bag, and nurse. Ira is eager to please and to emulate the great man, who, at times, treats him with no more than flickering interest. Whatever George gives to Ira, he can easily take back with a single devastating sentence. (“You’re my only friend, and I don’t even like you.”) At times, we seem to be watching a kind of media-age “Sunset Boulevard”: there’s the lonely, wealthy wreck in a big Hollywood crypt, and a younger prisoner who’s slightly nauseated. Billy Wilder’s classic was Gothic in its details, however, and this movie features the relentless California sunshine. You wonder how L.A. comics, who sit in cars and paradisal gardens rather than in the pickled depths of the Carnegie Deli, can stay so dark in their jokes. But somehow they do. In the comedy-club and watering-hole scenes, Apatow shows us the professional rituals, the lingo, the rivalries, the acrid idiom that is home for these men.

Apatow has known Sandler since they roomed together in Los Angeles two decades ago, and the movie begins with a handheld video that Apatow made in that period: Sandler, speaking in the voice of an elderly Jewish woman, prank calls a sandwich place—the woman howls that she can’t stop throwing up her roast beef. The call isn’t that funny, but the elements of hostility, put-on, and pathos that shape the rest of the movie are all there. In those late-nineteen-eighties days, Adam Sandler, the big Jewish kid from Brooklyn, talked dirty in his club appearances. Then he became a different entertainer: in movies like “Big Daddy,” the sludgy voice and the bits of half-embarrassed tenderness turned coy and cuddly. When Sandler appeared in public, singing things like “The Chanukah Song,” he conveyed the joy of doing comedy, and he was charming in pictures he made with Drew Barrymore (“The Wedding Singer,” “50 First Dates”), but in most of his work his smarts came out only in sly muttered remarks.

The Adam Sandler of “Funny People” is a revelation. George Simmons has the remorselessness of a man without illusions, and he’s frighteningly intelligent. He penetrates people’s defenses instantly, spots the weaknesses and fears that they’re covering up. Sandler shifts moods adroitly; he surprises us with his sudden outbursts, in which a comic’s timing turns bitterness into wit. George is even more hostile and cut off than Tom Hanks’s nihilistic standup spieler in “Punchline” (1988)—though in this movie, thank God, there’s no equivalent to Sally Field, the New Jersey housewife who tries to rescue Hanks’s wise guy from despair. The meaning of “Funny People” is that a comic can’t be saved by anyone, not even himself. There is only the next joke.

Ill, and in a foul mood, George goes back to standup; his self-disgusted, semi-indecipherable routines leave the audience ashen-faced. Apatow has never strayed far from the infantile sources of comedy in his movies, but this time he outperforms at the potty. Has there ever been a movie with so many penis jokes? George sings a melancholy song about his member; Ira and Leo are obsessed with the sex they’re not getting, but onstage they don’t talk about women—they talk about their own, and other men’s, equipment. This is the Apatow touch—the male panic about women which seems to veer toward homosexual attraction and then pulls back. His attitude is that infantile comedy needn’t be explained and “understood” by references to childhood traumas or anything else. In “Funny People,” there’s none of the too-cozy psychologizing that marred “Lenny,” the unfortunate bio-pic of Lenny Bruce. There’s only one fear that we need to understand: a comic who comes off the stage proclaiming “I killed! I murdered them!” is sure that he risks death every time he faces an audience; his attitude is kill or be killed. So the dick stays in the routine.

“Funny People” is leisurely, with many extended sequences, but the performers’ natural command of rhythm holds it in tension. The hilarious dialogues among the three roommates are like complicated, interlocked sparring matches. The scenes between Sandler and Rogen are more conventionally dramatic, but George’s shifting moods make them unstable and nerve-racking. Apatow is not only generous to performers here; he’s generous to himself, too, creating the kind of visual divertissements he has never attempted before—most memorably, a mock George Simmons family film, “Re-Do,” with Sandler’s grownup face digitally joined to the body of an infant. Sitting on the floor, chubby legs in front of him, George talks on the phone, complains, shouts. He literally returns to diapers—the comic’s inner infant never dies. But when George tries to act as a grownup in life, things don’t go as well. He has a vision of the happiness he lost—a relationship with a live-wire actress, Laura (Leslie Mann), twelve years earlier. He cheated on her, and they never married, but, his disease in remission, he tries to get something going with her again, even though she’s now living in Northern California with her two daughters (the actual children of Apatow and Leslie Mann) and her fierce Australian husband (Eric Bana). Like an errant meteor, George crashes into a functioning family. The last third of “Funny People” is a further development of the question that “Knocked Up” asked: What does it take to be a husband? Apatow, who probably understands the obsessive loneliness of comics as well as anyone, also knows a thing or two about family life. The miracle of “Funny People” is that it brings these two entirely dissimilar, even antagonistic worlds into a single, resonant whole. ♦