Sad ha-ha

Judd Apatow’s Funny People is half of a great film and all of a good one; it’s consistently funny yet displays more room for its cast to breathe, bump about and into one another, with fewer inspired improvisatory riffs and giggles but a lot more nuance than came out of his previous films.

The excellent half starts with bigtimestar waking up alone and lonely in his manse; George, almost too-perfect a superimposition onto a certain image of Sandler himself, makes low-brow high-concept films and is much, much loved by the public for it. He breezes through his life–shaking hands, posing for photos, then scurrying home to wander the halls–but is caught short by an unexpected terminal diagnosis. And the film digs deep, illustrating that this impending doom does less to change George’s approach to life than to most fully reveal it. He starts doing stand-up, and it is bitter, biting, self-loathing stuff. (First time back onstage, he bombs, too miserable to sell the punchlines, including one really brutal one about the Holocaust. I laughed, but no one on screen does.) There are all these amazing bits intertwined with some more conventional stuff (meeting a young mentee, sidestories about reconnecting with family and an old flame) where Sandler is just bilious. He plays a little “joke” tune on the piano to one audience, singing slightly off-key how he hates them, they’re all cocksuckers, and when he dies they won’t even come to his grave. As a study of the rage and fear and anxiety underlying comic performance, it’s up there with some of Shandling’s stuff . . .

It then, alas, becomes quite a bit more familiar when he decides to reignite that old flame. Oh, it doesn’t just get all sweet redemptive pap, and maintains a corrosive edge–and resists neat happy ends. But the rigor of some of that earlier rage is diffused and–for this viewer–is missed. Still, I wasn’t surprised to enjoy it, but I was surprised at how good Apatow is with a much broader range of tough emotions–it recalls and returns to some of the stuff he did on tv, with Shandling and Freaks and Geeks.