After giving us “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” a mature but funny look at dating, it must have been a logical next step for Judd Apatow to direct “Knocked Up,” a mature but funny film that takes place a few years later in an average person’s life, during the process of preparing for parenthood.  Smart but never pretentious, funny without ever stepping away from reality, Apatow’s newest film is a clear winner and one worth seeing.

Knocked Up
4 Stars

Comedies are just about always about the absurd.  Think about it, try to name five comedies in the past few years that have given us real people and real situations.  Sure, there are rare gems like the semi-grounded Clerks II, but most of what we get is something along the lines of the over-the-top Talladega Nights or – dare I mention its name – Wild Hogs.  The very definition of humor is a comic, absurd, or incongruous quality causing amusement.  So when a movie like Knocked Up, a film ripped straight out of reality, and is one of the funnier movies in the recent output of Hollywood; it’s one worth noting.

Ben, a man with a little extra chunk, finds a woman with a face worthy of the cover of Seventeen magazine at a club, and even gets the invite to go home with her for a one night deal.  That’s good!  She gets pregnant.  That’s bad!  But they’re going to try to make it work and have the child together.  That’s good!  They start yelling at each other and having a hard time creating a relationship out of nothing.  That’s bad!

 

But hey, no one ever said that love was easy, and writer/director Judd Apatow gets some serious brownie points for portraying this fragile relationship that started out mostly thanks to alcoholic consumption and a rogue condom as being as volatile as it should be.

Our director adds to the reality of the situation with steady-cam shots, what must have been largely improvised scenes and a sometimes bland, unintentional but utterly believable color scheme delivered by its digital cameras.

The jokes are fueled by the nervousness of the impending baby and relationship of the parents, not by larger-than-life people who you’ve often seen on the big screen but never on walking on the street.  It helps to make the film feel as though it might have been a documentary about two random people who happened to get pregnant together.

Apatow gets plenty of help from his actors though.  Seth Rogen, as Ben, is undeniably the slacker-extraordinarie that his character calls him to be.  Living off of a lawsuit settlement, the guy’s only ambitions are to smoke pot and help his friends create their website that highlights nude scenes from movies.  On the other hand, you’ve got Katherine Heigl as the blonde who sails into her job as a personality for the E! Network with her carefree laugh and easy going but serious attitude.  When their lives are crashed into each other, they’re awkward together.  They aren’t some Hollywood romance, and you can feel the discomfort in each one’s demeanor.  You can see why they’re fond of each other, but they’re just too different to be peas in a a pod with each other.  We also get a great performance out of Paul Rudd, the family man who just doesn’t know how live as a husband.

Maybe the best thing about Knocked Up is if you cut out every laugh the comedy, it could have absolutely been your typical European independent film about the difficulty of relationships, communication and love.  Not that there’s any justification to editing out Apatow and his cast’s jokes, Rudd in particular will have you on your side with just his imitation of Robert DeNiro or his soul-searching speech about bubbles.  With so many comedies out there solely relying on laughs to work, it’s refreshing to see a true filmmaker deliver something as mature as Knocked Up, a movie that works on every level.  If you want laughs or if you want reality, you can’t go wrong.