Funny People

I may at last have seen an Apatow Productions film that could benefit from the inevitable extended cut on DVD. Strange, considering that, of the three films he's written and directed and the seemingly dozens of others he's co-written or produced over the last five years, this one suffers the most from his bloated running times. Funny People, however, needs a longer cut, or at least a version that substitutes new scenes for old, bloated ones.

Ideally, a re-cut of the film would drastically alter its third act, which is really a fourth act and possibly a fifth. All two (or three) of these final acts are resolved in the last five minutes of the film, and therein lies the problem. Funny People is Apatow's most personal project yet, and an objective hand needed to step in to revise the structure.

Oh well, if he insists on making a two-and-a-half hour dramedy, Apatow certainly knows how to stuff it to the rafters. George Simmons (Adam Sandler) learns that he suffers from a rare, life-threatening blood disease at the start of the film, and that he only has an 8 percent chance of survival. An hour later, however, he recovers. That leaves 3/5 of a film to handle the dissipated tension.

This structure is the film's strength and weakness, because it opens a bold, real type of movie that seeks to relay its message naturally, without plot contrivances or a need to get plot out of the way first. On the other hand, a film about a person coming to terms with a near-death experience and bettering himself as a result should address that experience, something Funny People constantly sidesteps.

Filling the gaps in the first hour (and the rest of the film) is a small group of struggling actors and comedians who share an apartment in L.A. Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) works a deli counter by day, but his real passion is stand-up. Noticeably rough around the edges, Ira nevertheless manages to slightly impress George, who came to the comedy club to vent some of his fears and frustrations on stage. George hires Ira to write jokes and, eventually, to serve as a full-time assistant, much to the jealousy and awe of Ira's flatmates Leo (Jonah Hill), another amateur comic clearly destined for the big leagues, and Mark (Jason Schwarztman), a moderately talented actor who scored the lead on an insufferably painful sitcom about a teacher connecting with inner-city youth.

Rogen and Sandler carry the film, and they both produce some of their finest work. It's a shame, that some people profess an exasperation with Rogen, as he's finally nailed down a style that allows him to utilize his impressive gift for improvisation while remaining on-topic. His Ira is wonderfully and hopelessly awkward on-stage, and he provides the film a beating heart to replace George's calloused, blackened one in the reflective moments. Sandler channels that darkness he brought to the fore in Punch-Drunk Love; still funny but searching for life's meaning, George at last realizes his solitude after a lifetime of losing himself to the false love of Hollywood, and Sandler beautifully captures the pain of a man who has everything but the only woman he ever loved.

That woman is played by Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann, who must shoulder the burden of much of the film's drama. When George shows signs of recovery, he attempts to reconnect with her Laura, and Mann brings serious weight to a character who must reconcile her lingering feelings for George, her anguish and resentment concerning her husband (played by an alternately loopy and intimidating Eric Bana in an interesting role clearly, tragically cut down in post-production) as well as her fears of divorce. She doesn't fully factor into the story until the last hour, which is a vital mistake because she lifts it out of the mire of its bloated middle section. Mann stole the show in Knocked Up, and she nearly does so here, though Schwartzman reigns triumphant with his irascible, pompous jerk.

Funny People is unlike anything Judd Apatow has ever made or produced, indeed unlike any comedy-drama that I can think of at the moment. The near-death epiphany is a well-trod road, but filtering it through the bleak no man's land of stand-up comedy gives it an edge. Most people tend to think of stand-up as some glorious job that lands you fame, wealth and nookie, but in reality most spend their whole lives struggling to even pay the rent (when they're even home, that is). Incidentally, when I was a kid, my friends used to encourage me to become a comedian when I grew up, not realizing that A) half of the jokes I told from the ages of 5-15 I'd cribbed from films and television and B) they were essentially trying to condemn me to a life of poverty and crippling cynicism. Notice how George, who broke out of the stand-up circuit and into Hollywood megastardom 20 years ago, returns to the stage as much out of fatalism and resignation as a desire to recapture a moment of youth.

That's what makes the massive flaws of the film all the more glaring: it has so much going for it. For all its dark comedy and interesting characters, it spends far too much time repeating segments to pad the length. Only two Yo Teach! clips should have stayed in the final cut, and the first act needed to leave a good 15 minutes on the cutting room floor. In the final, shortest act, Apatow bombards us with both Ira and George's relationship woes, an argument between Ira and his friends and conflict between George and Laura's husband (which in turn leads to conflict between George and Ira), and then he seeks to resolve all of these threads in a disjointed semi-montage. It undoes much of what makes Funny People great, and it results in a film that manages to connect enough to warrant a ticket purchase but severely disappoints in the end. Its most damning aspect, though, is that, for a film about bettering oneself, George never really changes until the final moments. What, then, was the point of sitting through those repetitive two-and-a-half hours?

Punch-Drunk Love

Following the highly-lauded ensemble drama Magnolia, modern auteur Paul Thomas Anderson scaled things way back, offering up a surreal romantic comedy called Punch-Drunk Love. Reviews were mixed, which is just as well since I hated Magnolia so there was nowhere to go but up for me. In hindsight, Punch-Drunk Love, though wildly different in story and theme, firmly points towards the direction he would take with his masterpiece There Will Be Blood.

Adam Sandler reaches into the darker side that always came with his comedy and expands it into a full force as Barry Egan, an executive at a small company that makes novelties toiletries. He tends to avoid any lasting conversation and especially fears phone calls from his seven sisters, who torment him in that way that seems playful to them but never to the person being teased. We see him ably speaking to a potential client before he answers a phone call, but when he picks up the receiver and hears one of his sister's voices you can see something change in him immediately: he stutters, avoids simple questions and generally looks like a caged animal looking for an escape.

At the start of the film, Barry gets to work before anyone else to find a truck has dumped a harmonium out front. He runs and hides behind a wall as if afraid it will see him. A woman, Lena (Emily Watson), drives up and asks Barry if he would take her car keys and give them to the auto mechanic next door when they open. Later we learn that she set this up because she spotted a picture of Barry on one of his sister's desks at work. She seems to know about Barry's mental instability but is attracted to him anyway.

Barry's psychosis comes to the fore when he attends his sister's birthday party. He arrives at her house, opens the door hears his sister's laughing over an old story about how they teased him, tries to leave unnoticed, then opens the door to go back in. At the party, he tries to speak calmly but flubs words as his sisters open old wounds. Finally, he can take no more and kicks out the glass doors.

Lena eventually asks Barry on a date, and he nervously accepts. When they go to a restaurant, he mentions how he's buying up pudding cups to exploit a frequent flier miles giveaway (based on a true story). The two hit it off, until Lena brings up something Barry's sister told her about his childhood, and Barry excuses himself to the bathroom, which he promptly destroys. Of course he is thrown out of the restaurant, but Lena follows along as if nothing happened. I cannot say what Lena sees in Barry. Maybe it's the fact that she's an only child and envies someone who grew up surrounded by siblings, or perhaps she realizes that, because Barry grew up surrounded by his teasing sisters, he feels as lonely as she. Then again, maybe she just has latent S&M tendencies and loves Barry for his violent streak.

Barry feels something too, though he doesn't know how to act upon it. He's found someone who not only managed to see through that placid mask he presents to the world and understands his inner fury to be something more than "weirdness" as his sisters label it, but to love him anyway. When Lena heads to Hawaii, Barry drags his friend (Luis Guzman) along to all the grocery stores in town to clean out pudding cups, only to find that the company takes 6-8 weeks to process his claim for the flier miles. After a mild freak out, Barry just buys a damn ticket. It's a simple moment, but quietly hilarious and touching. The two meet on Waikiki Beach in the kind of perfect moment that normally would earn a groan, but works in a film that never lets on in what direction it's heading.

Early on, Barry calls a phone sex service though not, we sense, because he wants the actual service. He speaks to a woman who tries to stimulate him, but he sounds almost confused by the instructions she gives him, as if he doesn't know what to do. The next morning she calls back and tries to extort money from him, sending four "blond brothers" to strongarm him when he refuses. Barry gives up $500 in the hopes that they go away, but reconsiders later and demands his money back. Eventually he must face down the brothers as well as a Utah porn king (Philip Seymour Hoffman), both of which play out completely unexpectedly.

What links Punch-Drunk Love to There Will Be Blood is Anderson's bleak, unsettling direction. Where Daniel Plainview stood in the middle of a vast nothingness and somehow rose above it, Barry walks down the bright-lit aisles of a grocery store that look so bland compared to the man in the blue suit who travels among them, yet they swallow him whole. Later, when Barry goes to another store to get the cups he needs to get to Hawaii to see Lena, he stands above the aisles, a man now willing to join the world instead of hide within it. The film also calls to mind the surreality of Magnolia with its disorienting backgrounds and its bright color wash. After their first date, Barry takes Lena back to her place, and leaves. When he reaches the lobby, she calls him to invite him back for a kiss, resulting in an amusing bit where Barry roams back through the identical looking hallways before finally stumbling upon the right door.

Sandler's performance may seem like an anomaly for him, but there's always been a violent streak in his comedies: Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, Big Daddy: all feature characters given to violent outbursts, but they're filtered through the ridiculous for humor. Though Barry is just as explosive, Sandler plays him with an isolation that lends itself to both frightening drama and pitch-black comedy.

Punch-Drunk Love isn't on the level of Anderson's two best films, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, but it serves to bridge the two eras of his career while still being a thoroughly entertaining film in its own right. It's the best kind of film: one you don't see coming, and the excellent acting from the two main characters is excellent (PSH steals his scenes as well). It may be just a bit too "arty" in some places, and the harmonium adds little to the story, either literally or symbolically, but this is a surprisingly tender film wrapped in a terrifying black dramedy and a triumph from America's most promising young director.