Straight to DVD

Knocked Up

In parentland, the arrival of winter means it's finally time for summer movies. Leading the way in word of mouth this year were two Judd Apatow films, Knocked Up and Superbad. Since Whitney and I are big fans of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, there was never any question both would make our queue. (In fact, they both ended up arriving the same day.)

Possibly because we felt slightly closer to its subject matter at this advanced stage of our lives, we went with Knocked Up first. Its plot is refreshingly simple: L.A. television entertainment reporter Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), celebrating a recent promotion, hooks up with slacker Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) on a one-night stand. Eight weeks later, she discovers she's pregnant. Ben doesn't appear like great husband-father material to a beautiful, ambitious career woman, but he's willing to be there for her when she breaks the news. So when Alison decides she wants to keep the baby, the couple try to forge a relationship during the pregnancy months.

Much of the film is about the immense contrast between these two parents-to-be: Ben lives with four fellow stoners; his "job" is working with them (very occasionally) on launching a celebrity-skin website. Alison, besides being an up-and-comer at her network, lives with her sister, Debbie, (Leslie Mann) and brother-in-law, Pete, (Paul Rudd) and their two kids. So it's essentially a Felix-and-Oscar situation ... if Felix were about to have a baby.

Knocked Up is very funny. As usual in an Apatow film, this is largely thanks to rapid-fire guy banter, which in this case takes two different forms: the obscene, clever verbal ping-pong Ben and his roommates engage in; and the sardonic, more laid-back bonding between Ben and Pete. The movie also offers up some nice parenting humor in the relationship between Debbie and Pete, whose crabbiness, exhaustion, and frustration with each other we found, um, frighteningly familiar. (Mann and Rudd are both at the top of their games.)

I did have this nagging sense, though, that this movie aspired to be more than just a comedy—it wants to be a sort of edgy romantic comedy, with all the smatterings of depth and weightiness that term often entails. And Knocked Up does succeed at times at getting beneath the surface, to the feelings of fear and loss (and more fear) that attach themselves to anyone about to go through the portal of parenthood. (Whitney and I both felt that Apatow managed this better with the male characters than the female ones—but at least an attempt at equal time is made.)

The film's other problem is with its premise. It's just very hard to believe, given the impression made by Ben the morning after the initial hookup, that Alison would even consider making this man an integral part of her life, which she does with only the slightest hesitation. (You can invent a backstory that explains this, but I generally like my movies to do that work for me.) Once you've suspended that that gargantuan amount of disbelief, the movie carries you the rest of the way smoothly and plausibly, but having to make the leap robs the movie of a good deal of its tension.

These are fairly minor quibbles, though. Knocked Up is a lot of fun, and its attempts to be more than that are successful often enough to provide postwatching food for thought. Can you really expect much more of a romantic comedy?