Bromance involving a wicked old jaded comedy actor (Adam Sandler) and the wide-eyed ingenue he hires to be his assistant while he deals with his illness by ignoring it and getting back into stand-up comedy.
Its true that Funny People is a mature work from Judd Apatow, but I consider Knocked Up and 40 Year Old Virgin about the two maturest movies in the genre ever made. You might argue that's because its a genre about boys refusing to grow up, talking about their genitals and refusing to settle down. Judd has always been prepared to take those kinds of guys and basically force them to grow up or settle down, which is the riskiest thing you can do in that genre.
Funny People is less of a high-concept film than his two previous efforts, particularly as the plot wends its way following the characters and their relationships. One of its central themes is a very interesting one about what's its like to be a comedian and have to deal with the more serious aspects of life, like the news that you have a life-threatening illness, most obviously. If his previous films seemed often bloated, despite their strong focus, Funny People suffers badly in its final hour. Unfortunately for Funny People, there seem to be many hours to choose from in Funny People. For all its two hours and twenty-odd minutes, Funny People seems far far longer. It could have benefited from picking one thing to wrap up by the 90 minute mark; Funny People seems intent on wrapping everything up, and using many words to do it, instead of ever using a single image, which is what separates films from plays. This is down to the way Judd works; his scenes are often pieced together from riffs and variations the actors have done on his material during filming; which is why his actors, who are usually comedians themselves, always use words to resolve things. This problem could have been solved by excising entire improvised scenes and replacing them with single images, to save us all going through unnecessary arguments, where characters often talk about their themes and feelings, which if Judd had written it, would be bad writing. To put it simply, Judd's movies tend to lack what Hemingway described as the iceberg principle: what you see is only the top of the iceberg; it hints at the rest of the story underneath. This principle is obviously more suited to dramas than comedies, where the most important thing is humour, so things necessarily are a bit more explicit than in dramas.
Being a fan of Judd's work in general, you grow to accept his faults, but the strengths of Funny People make it a real shame that it lost its focus so badly in the final hour. It contains Seth Rogen's most charming performance to date, and Adam Sandler creates Judd's most fascinating characters to date. Its filthiness lacks the variety of previous efforts, mainly being repetitions of the word "cock." Unfortunately there are only so many times this word can be used in a movie before it begins to sound like a fetish. Yes, its that bad.
Here be spoilers, as I need to discuss the offending portion of the movie. Sandler's character is a really bad guy. He presents as a villain in the opening. By 90 minutes we nearly forgive him how he treats people and grow to not mind living with him; but then Judd felt it necessary to give his wife, actress Leslie Mann, and their two children, all of who featured memorably in Knocked Up as Paul Rudd's family, along with Australian actor Eric Bana, a sizeable chunk of screen time. Sadly all these characters are completely unnecessary and they dissolve what once was an interesting situation into the oldest of Hollywood cliches, a love triangle. The problem was it was enough work to get us to like Adam Sandler's character, and get him to start being nice to Seth Rogen's character, that we were satisfied when that occured, at 90 minutes. It simply wasn't necessary to do all that French farce business surrounding Eric Bana being Leslie Mann's new man and them sneaking behind his back, all the while the only interesting storyline (Seth Rogen) sits on the couch minding the kids.
So, a movie with great promise that severely broke its promise through poor discipline and an inability to draft its material and cut its fat to create a far better-tasting meal.
