Knocked Up

Directed by Judd Apatow

Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up may have a provocative title, but just like a TV sitcom that placates an audience’s apprehension about the real world, it neither titillates nor challenges. Knocked Up offers simplified characters in formulaic situations: slacker bachelor Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and young TV hostess Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) have a drunken one-night-stand which leads to unexpected pregnancy. This prime-time premise is so blatant it ought to have commercial breaks between each transparently fabricated scene. Yet, as in last year’s hit, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow delivers jokes on cue—with TV-timing and TV-superficiality. His corruption of film comedy is ignored by coach-potato audiences and critics.

Not a film-worthy TV genius like James L. Brooks, Apatow’s only ambition is complaisance. That’s what he learned from his background in TV production where his shows, “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared,” faked originality. Here, Ben and Alison’s relationship recalls the perfectly paired-up couples on commercial television. Their Jew-Wasp ethnic contrast causes no cultural frisson. Knocked Up jokes about the tensions that develop between men and women, eventually soothing unease with references/resemblances to other TV shows. Ben muses that, “Marriage is like an unfunny version of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’” But that’s just not funny—because both he and Apatow mean it.

In the great pop tradition of Bringing Up Baby and M*A*S*H, movie comedies used to find new, revelatory approaches to basic human experiences. Apatow offers the most vulgar, unrevealing TV commonplaces. Despite jokes about condoms and sexual positions, Apatow’s pseudo-frankness only raises issues that can be conventionally resolved. He enshrines the immaturity of “Freaks and Geeks” through Ben’s stoner friends whiling away their bachelorhood by working on a web site catalog of female movie star nude scenes (clips from Wild Things and Carrie stand out) but then becoming attendants when Alison gives birth. Perpetual Male Adolescence Syndrome generates most of Apatow’s gags—a true malady, perhaps, but Apatow lets it distract from the longings for procreation and the insecurities of companionship that mark adulthood. This keeps Knocked Up TV-shallow (but at feature-film length). When John Hughes tackled pregnancy in 1988’s She’s Having a Baby, he confronted the Animal House-lassitude and coach-potato view of life that Apatow favors. It now threatens to become the cultural standard.

Knocked Up belongs with the boyishly uncouth sex farces The Breakup and Wedding Crashers. Its only invention is chubby, hairy, slovenly Ben, a junior Albert Brooks so persistently, unhygienically juvenile, that he and Alison are a sensual mismatch. This resembles The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s insipid view of sexuality. Even the rocky marriage of Alison’s shrill sister (Leslie Mann) and her shy husband (Paul Rudd) further protracts arrested development as adult truth. From its white boys clowning to Old Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” to the girls-don’t-get-it discussion of Back to the Future, Knocked Up trivializes what used to be called “the battle of the sexes” by burying it under pop culture fetishes. Apatow’s jokey irreverence turns out irrelevant to the issues that once gave romantic comedies substance. 

In Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Stephen Harvey’s excellent survey of the great filmmaker, the 1951 film, Father of the Bride, and its pregnancy sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, were cited as templates for early 1950s television sitcoms.

Minnelli’s domestic farces depicted the social and sexual habits of post-war America’s generational transition and established an elegant visual archetype. But Apatow’s not just inelegant, his crude sensibility lacks genuine insight. Knocked Up is funny—but in deleterious ways. Even when a husband screams, “How much fucking ‘NBC Dateline’ can you watch!” it’s always in defense of TV-habit, always TV-vapid. Minnelli’s ingenuity is reversed.