Funny People (2009)

Rated R for being pretty darned R-rated.  Yeah, I know what I wrote.  Judd Apatow's core talent is to mimic real-world vulgarity and then, somehow, escalate it.  As such, this movie is fully of language and graphic descriptions of sexual acts.  It also has a sex scene with nudity.  But I'm a guy who laughs a lot at Apatow's brand of crassness, so who am I to throw stones?  

DIRECTOR:  Judd Apatow

Do you know why I'm writing right now?  It's because I'm too sleepy to read.  Yeah, sometimes I have to prioritize my productivity.  And, sure, I won't be able to finish this in about twenty minutes.  But I'll get a good chunk of this done.

I'll tell you what.  Serendipity is a weird thing.  Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  I've been watching Funny People slowly over the course of a few days.  (Sure, that may be blasphemy to a lot of you.) But I got to the second half of the movie and then the whole thing felt like Gatsby.  Now, I dismissed a lot of this as something that has just been taking over my life right now.  I'm teaching Gatsby right now.  It was the 100th anniversary and I got all kinds of treats from my boss who is unabashedly obsessed with the book.  I couldn't help but think that this was the English teacher in me over-reading into it.  

Then I Googled it.

Sure enough, the IMDB page has that under the trivia section.  Apparently, that was entirely intentional.  Yeah, I'm not an idiot here.  I know that some people might fight this one pretty hard and I can't even throw stones at that.  The biggest thing that I'm fighting against with the Gatsby comparison is the first half of the movie.  Funny People is a great movie that I was surprised that didn't take off.  But the one thing that I understand frustration with is the fact that it feels like two movies.  It's  long movie, especially for a comedy.  The first half deals with the very real concerns of confronting one's own mortality, especially when it comes to securing a legacy. I want to talk about all of that because, if I'm being honest, I find that part of the movie far more interesting than the Gatsby part.  But the second half of the movie is aggressively The Great Gatsby.

The easy read of that Gatsby is that George Simmons is Gatsby, the rich man who regrets letting the love of his life go.  Admittedly, Simmons doesn't have the same motivations as Gatsby.  Gatsby makes money to win Daisy over.  Simmons lets Laura go to pursue his riches and wants a do-over.  (Aw, the fictional in-universe baby movie is called Re-Do.) But Laura is stuck in a terrible marriage with Clarke, who is just a nicer version of Tom Buchanan.  Apatow doesn't go as far as making Clarke racist, despite the fact that he's really into cultural appropriation.  But there are kids involved!  It's Pammy all over again.  But the real deep cut is the role that Ira plays in the story.  Ira is Nick Carroway.  The really interesting part of Funny People is that the story is about Ira, not George.  Admittedly, Ira is more invested in the whole story than Nick ever gets.  Because the protagonist of the story is Ira, Ira is allowed to have a bit more backbone than Nick ever does.  My frustration with Nick Carroway is always his passive attitude to all of the nonsense going on around him.  Golly, I actually like how, narratively, Ira works better than Nick.  (Don't tell my boss.  Gatsby is a perfect book for her.) 

I got onto the whole "rewatch Funny People" thing because of my comedy podcasts that I listen to.  Right now, I'm deep into You Made It Weird wth Pete Holmes.  But I remember when Funny People was first out, it was the movie to be talked about.  Listen, I'm not a standup.  I probably will never be a standup.  But one of the things that Pete Holmes talks about is the importance of paying dues.  He keeps comparing it to The Karate Kid, but it shows that it only helps to take the whole thing slow.  Appropriately enough, Pete Holmes would go on to work with Judd Apatow intimately on Crashing, the show that was semi-autobiographical about his life.  Apatow got deep into standup.  You can get the absolute respect that Apatow has for the entire standup world with this one.  It's funny, because I think about this being a movie about standup first, a movie about death second, and The Great Gatsby third.  There's a lot of plates spinning in the air here.  But if you want to altruistically live the life of an up-and-coming comedian, Funny People kind of does it great.  I assume.  I write a lot.

But I mentioned, to me, the real meat of the movie is the fact that we have a hard time processing death.  There's a truly great line saying that George is the only person to face death and not come out a different person.  Part of what makes Funny People stick to the ribs more than other movies is the fact that it refuses to pull punches a little bit.  I think I'm growing cynical in my old age.  I tend to like a depressing message more than anything else in movies.  But Apatow doesn't really seem to have George mirror the Scrooge story as a means to be shocking.  I think the narrative that Apatow is playing with is that it is hard to make real change.  A lot of the movie is devoted to George and the way that he processes death.  Yeah, George is a jerk from moment one to the end of the movie.  He's always kind of been a jerk. There's something endearing about him when he's a young man making prank calls.  But he's never outright a good person.  

I suppose you could argue that his hiring of Ira shows that he has a bit of a heart.  And, yeah, Ira melts George a little bit.  But George doesn't have his healthier moments because a desire to be a better person.  Instead, he's afraid.  A lot of his behavior is a manifestation of fear.  That's a little bit of a hard nut to crack because George is so isolated from humanity in that giant house of him, so the notion of him being a good person was always a bit of an uphill battle.   When George blows up in the first half of the movie, there's something inherently sympathetic about his reactions.  He's a scared man who completely lacks a support system around him.  That's why Ira is necessary to the story.  After all, Ira is the Nick Carroway of the story.  He has a distanced relationship with Ira because there's a power dynamic that can never really be leveled for a lot of the movie.

But that's why the second half of the movie works well with the first half.  The second half of the movie shows George thinking that he's made some major changes in his life.  (I mean, that Eminem scene is perfect, but it also plants that seed of immorality in him.) And that's kind of the truth that Apatow is spouting to a certain extent.  It's incredibly cynical, but it also is imbued with verisimilitude.  People don't change just because they're faced with tragedy or hardship.  Every movie we ever see, we have characters who go through some kind of trial and come out a better person.  (Unless the story is serialized.  Then, we have to do everything that we can to keep them the same person at all costs.)  

And I would like to point out that Apatow probably isn't screaming that people don't change.  The absolute denouement of the film is George visiting Ira at his old job.  The two of them put the past behind them and George becomes vulnerable, offering Ira tags for his bits. (See, I do listen to comedy podcasts!  I called them "tags" and "bits".)  It's because George wants to change.  The first time I saw this movie, it bothered me how everyone was mad at Ira in the movie.  Like Ira, one of my triggers is infidelity.  Ira, in a move morally culpable unlike Nick Carroway, tries to stop George from sleeping with Laura.  He points out that there are two little girls who would be affected by this decision and that it wasn't George's right to make that decision.  He then tries to stop Laura from dumping Clarke.  And, admittedly, it does backfire on him.  (I am bothered that Laura doesn't have the self-assessment abilities to point out that she lied to Clarke one last time.) 

But when George is driving Ira back from that debacle, he is unable to comprehend his own responsibility for the emotional train wreck that he caused.  Heck, Clarke --who is the Tom Buchanan of the piece --has more self-awareness than the actual Tom Buchanan.  He takes responsibility for his actions.  But it's because there is a direct correlation between his goals and his morality.  George keeps apologizing to Laura, but it almost is a sadness that he let her get away, not because he did things that were bad.  Again, these are all arguable points.  But at the end of the day,  I really don't see George as someone who is sorry so much as he regrets the road not taken.  

I honestly don't see why Funny People isn't considered top tier Apatow.  Apatow is actually a genius. But I tend to like his sleeper hits more than the ones that people preach all day.  Again, between Funny People and This is 40, I'm on board this guy's films for all time.