Lots of People

This past weekend brought a movie that presented a real dilemma for me. Funny People was written and directed by Judd Apatow (whose other work I've enjoyed). It has Seth Rogen and Leslie Mann, both very funny actors. And it has Adam Sandler, who in my opinion might be one of the least funny people who inexplicably keeps finding people willing to put him in movies. So what am I to do, see this new film or not?

Well, things ultimately settled on the "see it" side. And I think I am just as divided in my opinion of the movie as I was going in.

Judd Apatow was sort of going back to his Freaks and Geeks roots here in this movie, where laughs are important, but not as important as telling a story with emotional resonance. In his other, more recent work, I've felt the latter has trumped the former. This is the story of a comedian and big-time movie actor who discovers he has a terminal disease. He strikes up a friendship with an aspiring stand-up who starts writing material for him as he goes back out on the stand-up circuit. Hilarity and tenderness ensues.

Let's get the Sandler business out of the way right now. In the more serious moments of the movie, he's actually rather good. In the moments where he's just cracking jokes casually, out of the spotlight, he's actually funny. But there are still significant chunks of the movie where he's playing broad and loud, and it's awful.

The movie does manage to get a little mileage out of it, at least. Sandler is basically playing a version of himself, an actor who has made a career of painful comedies with stupid premises, where he gets "laughs" by shouting as loudly as he can. So there's a sort of "meta" level at play when the character expresses some loathing for himself and his predicament over the type of life he's led.

Seth Rogen is great as the younger stand-up (and Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman are also strong as his roommates). The first half of the movie walks a perfect line between being funny and being serious, and it's largely thanks to Rogen. There are laughs, and they're well earned, and there are pensive moments that are genuine.

But unfortunately, Funny People is really two movies at one. I mean that in every way I can think of, including run time -- the thing lasts a staggering two hours and 20 minutes, and feels longer. And somewhere at about the halfway mark, the "working standup battling disease" plot dries up, and we're then thrown a "rekindled romance" plot involving a woman that Sandler's character drove away years ago, before he was famous.

Leslie Mann plays this woman who is now married to someone else, with two daughters. And she seems just as talented here as she has in other Apatow movies. But this part of the movie just drags on and on. The laughs get very few and far between, the emotional content is less compelling, and time grinds to a halt.

I sort of feel that with a better writing polish and tighter editing, even this back half of the movie could have been salvaged into a moderately entertaining film of its own... but even in that case, it wouldn't have any business being grafted to the first half of the movie. It appears that Judd Apatow may have reached that level of fame where he no longer has people around him to tell him when things aren't going right -- or where he has the clout to ignore anyone who does.

All this might sound like it's leading to a fairly dismal grade from me, but I do have to go back to the fact that the first hour or so of this movie really works. It's sweet, it's funny, and all the more impressively so in my mind for being those things despite the presence of Adam Sandler. But that's only the first of the two movies that is Funny People.

Overall, I'd rate it a B-. That's probably high enough to be worth a recommendation, but I must again warn you if you do go -- you're committing quite a lot of time out of your day.