Judd Apatow's third directorial effort, Funny People, is being marketed as a comedy. And, to be fair, the flick revolves around a handful of comedians and has genuinely funny moments. But it's not a comedy in the conventional sense of the term. Apatow, who also penned the script, uses misdirection to tell a more dramatic story modeled more on All About Eve than Billy Madison.
George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is a successful comedian who's received bad news: he has advanced leukemia. One night at a comedy club, he comes across Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), an aspiring comedian. Simmons hires the young gun to wright jokes and be an assistant, though their relationship quickly begins to look like friends. Whatever the relationship, it's tested when George reconnects with a former fiancee (Leslie Mann) and Ira speaks his mind.
There is so much story crammed into this admittedly long film-it has a 146 minutes running time-it wouldn't be disingenuous to say the end result is ambitious, possibly overambitious. There's a veritable flood of major and minor characters and a host of plot lines which never quite gel to form a cohesive whole. When Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote the 1950's Eve, he didn't have to worry about making the audience laugh or living up to some preconceived notion of what the movie was going to be. Rather, all he had to deal with was adapting Mary Orr's original story for the screen and juggling the ego's of both Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. Apatow's version doesn't work precisely because he found himself having to juggle disparate elements which shouldn't be thrown together.
Take, for instance, a subplot concerning Ira, his roommates (Jonah Hill and Jason Swartzman) and a girl named Daisy (Abrey Plaza). The relationship between the four recurs trough the entire picture yet amounts to nothing in the long run. It's as if Apatow simply threw the characters in to give his usual stable of talent something to do. What, exactly, does Ira living on their couch have to do with anything? Where does Daisy truly enter the picture? The sad truth is neither is connected to the main plot. If Ira had articulated to George how knowing Daisy and Mark (Schwartzman) spent a night together made him feel, perhaps the younger man's actions in the third act could have made sense. But he doesn't and, more importantly, it doesn't.
Where the story should have focused its energy is delving deeply into the George/Ira relationship and, more specifically, why it is George decides to hire him. We're told it's because of the jokes, but that' terribly simplistic. There has to be something else. Is it because George is supposedly dying and he's lonely? Does he want to leave a legacy aside from juvenile comedy films? Or is it possible, no matter how remotely so, he wants to actually help Ira, that he's being selfless in his final hours? We're never told, leaving the audience to wonder about that lingering question at the end. Had this been a normal, everyday comedy, no one would give it a second thought. But due to Apatow's unconventional way of creating this comedy, he draws attention to these types of loose threads.
Funny People is wholly concerned with showing off to the audience. I can imagine Apatow writing certain scenes and congratulating himself for being so reverential toward the stand-up community, telling himself everyone between New York and Los Angeles will enjoy the references. I'll tell you quite simply Middle America won't get it. I'm told stand-up comics routinely get together to celebrate or just to eat. Fantastic, if Apatow is trying to recreate that milieu. But does it matter to people not in the loop? Doubtful; the sequence becomes something created for the "in crowd" instead of the masses. And to those of us who actually do care, it's overkill. (For the record, I noticed Ray Romano, Eminem, Norm McDonald, Carol Leifer, Andy Dick, Sarah Silverman and Paul Reiser. The cast list says a great many more were sprinkled in the finished product.)
There's nothing wrong with the cast; not a single one of them can compete with Davis or Crawford, though they're a solid group capable of playing comedy or drama depending on the script. Sandler and Rogen are known quantities, so we know what we're going to get with them in this genre. I was more struck by Leslie Mann and Eric Bana, who plays her husband Clark in the film. They're storyline is relatively small, though she is a magnetic presence whenever she takes the screen. And Bana does the most with the limited screen time he gets, effectively making the audience question whether he really is the douchebag Laura (Mann) has made him out to be. As with all things involved with the film, the third act, which squarely focuses on these two characters, runs overlong and wears out its welcome with far too long remaining.
Since he is the lead, I feel compelled to say something...substantial about Sandler, though what that something is I don't know. He's wholly convincing as a successful loner, someone who makes the people around him laugh but has precious little to laugh about when he's alone. Simmons isn't the most engaging or likeable character, especially when he verbally berates Ira late in the film. Maybe he's channeling Margo Channing after mentoring Ira's Eve Harrington, kicking the protege to the curb when he becomes a career threat.
A word of warning: Funny People is rated R for a very good reason. Each of the stand-up routines prominently deals with sex and profanity. No more than five minutes goes between references to balls or ****. In other words, it's a typical Apatow and Sandler film, not intended for the squemish or easily offended.