Eras of comedy are hardly ever defined by the work of a single actor, director or screenwriter. Instead, comedy is usually defined by regimes - frequent collaborations between specific actors, directors and screenwriters, collaborations that not only yield distinctive brands of humor but that also influence our notions of what's funny outside the theater. A great comedy often imprints a certain hilarious image in our consciousness, an image that we can recall whenever and wherever and at which we always find ourselves chuckling. Such moments are surprisingly absent from a film entitled Funny People"" - good thing, too.
The three faces of ""Funny People,"" Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Leslie Mann, all turn in remarkable performances in the third film written and directed by Judd Apatow. Of those three performers, Apatow's wife, Mann, stands out the most, playing her role with a candor that's both effortlessly natural and discreetly touching. Mann's character treads in some of the film's deepest, darkest waters, darker even than those swum by Sandler, the ostensible hero of ""Funny People."" Mann stutters, and yet it doesn't sound contrived; she gazes at Sandler and Eric Bana with a blank expression only because she is existentially paralyzed; and when she does make a move, it's always with a spontaneous fragility, as if any half-smile could easily give way to a stream of disarming tears. Each time Sandler appears on screen the film seems to gain 50 pounds, and Rogen's formerly chubby puppy-dog routine goes a long way toward shedding some of that weight. But let there be no doubt: Those who go into ""Funny People"" expecting a spiritual sequel to the moralist high jinks of ""Knocked Up"" or ""The 40-Year-Old Virgin"" will quickly find that whereas those films made you laugh and then feel, ""Funny People"" instead turns the temperature in the room way down and then asks a simple yet provocative question: Is what we're seeing funny, or is it true?
Folks looking for a straight comedy will probably prefer the film's first half, which is actually more morbid than the second half but is also more willing to alleviate its own heaviness with well-executed jokes. The second half is a baby step away from being a kind of psychodrama, and that's why ""Funny People"" is Apatow's most sophisticated and literary effort as a writer yet. In his first two films, Apatow helped to bring about a new paradigm in comedy by not burying his themes beneath a heap of gags and profanity; the gags and the profanity were certainly there, but they harmonized with the subject matter to produce truly adult comedy. In ""Funny People,"" Apatow employs lots of unspectacular but prevalent camera movement, lots of quick cutting to match the tempo of the film's constant back-and-forth exchanges and lots of music to enhance the emotional potency of each scene. However, the soundtrack is a weak spot; the acting and the images hardly need such a melodramatic glaze.
If there's anything worth objecting to in ""Funny People,"" it's this: While Apatow's desire to psychoanalyze someone (himself? his wife? Sandler? Rogen?) is commendable in its own way, the issues the film probes are gratingly bourgeois. Can Sandler find friendship with someone he employs? Can he find happiness through human companionship rather than through buying stuff and bedding groupies? Should Mann leave her wealthy dick of a husband to give it a go with her wealthy dick of an ex-boyfriend? We're expected to empathize with these characters and invest ourselves in the resolution of these questions, and some of the time we do; but what does that say about us as an audience? Ultimately, spending time with these people is an occasionally amusing but less-than-inspired burden.
