Apatow: This Is 40 (2012)

This Is 40 was billed as a "sort-of sequel" to Knocked Up, but it's more of a revisionist Knocked Up, since it takes two of the side characters from that film and presents them with the same dilemma that the main characters had the first time around: an unexpected pregnancy. The difference, this time, is that the pregnancy happens at 40, rather than 30, meaning that Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) are faced with a different set of anxieties and insecurities. While it's no Rebel Without A Cause, there is something of the flavor of that film in the way that Apatow seems to be marking out and elaborating a new generational category - in this case, the second bloom of adolescence that comes in his characters' late 30s, making 40 something of a second adulthood. For that reason, the film's idea of 40 oscillates quite vertiginously: on the one hand, it's a second 20, but, on the other hand, it’s a second 40, only a "blink away from 90." Having a child at 40, then, is not that different from being a grandparent – and both Pete’s father (Albert Brooks) and Leslie's father (John Lithgow) have in fact had children younger than Leslie and Paul's children, collapsing parenting and grandparenting into a generational aimlessness that makes for a surprisingly ambient, freeform film, much like the devolution of narrative in Funny People. Except that it’s not really as funny or as compassionate as Funny People, which suggested that Apatow’s characters might have a use-by date, might stop being endearing really quickly, but didn’t quite push them to the point that’s reached here, as Mann and Rudd put in two of their shrillest, most grating performances to date. Pete, in particular, feels like an implosion of all Apatow’s bromantic instincts – he’s a record executive, and it’s hard to think of a worse portrait of an aging music lover – while a lot of other Apatow regulars hang around the fringes in denuded, washed-out, impoverished ways. For the first time, an Apatow film tends to be most compelling or cathartic when it’s most aggressive – it’s a protest film, really, driven by rage more than anything else, so it’s a relief when all the whining finally spews over into the rants and monologues that dot the third act. Those rants don’t make the characters any more likeable, but they at least make them feel as if they’ve resigned themselves to being unlikeable, which is perhaps the most that can be asked from their extraordinary solipsism, or from this melancholy footnote to the bromance experiment.