Knocked Up
by Rick Kisonak (published 06/06/07).
Who could have predicted that, in a summer swarming with swashbucklers, ogres and superheroes, the most entertaining movie character would be an overweight stoner played by Seth Rogen? He’s the best thing in writer-director Judd (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) Apatow’s latest, which is itself the best thing to happen to film comedy since Will Ferrell discovered tighty whities.
Knocked Up offers the geek fairy tale of a twentysomething slacker who crosses paths with a major babe (Katherine Heigl) and gets luckier than he could have imagined. It all starts when Heigl, who works at the E! channel, is promoted from producer to on-air talent. This follows, believe it or not, a funny-as-hell cameo by the last person I’d expect to be funny as hell — Ryan Seacrest. If Apatow can turn Seacrest into a big-screen gutbuster, imagine what he does with the rest of the cast.
The young woman and her married sister (Leslie Mann, the real-life Mrs. Apatow) decide to celebrate the occasion with a girls’ night out at an L.A. club. Rogen buys them beers and chats them up. Mann is called home to deal with a looming chicken-pox crisis, leaving the odd couple unexpectedly paired. The potent cocktail of her good mood, his goofball charm and, well, lots of actual cocktails produces an otherwise mathematically impossible outcome. Heigl not only invites Rogen home, she’s so hot for his Pillsbury Dough Boy bod that she hustles him into her bed, where the two get their wires crossed and have condom-free sex.
Plot-wise, you can pretty much guess the rest. Rogen continues with his daily routine of doing bong hits and planning the launch of a half-baked porn site with his equally arrested buds — until he gets the call that changes his life. Heigl decides to go through with the pregnancy, he decides to be there for her, and, for the next 90 minutes, the two navigate a journey from sex partners to life mates.
The picture’s greatness doesn’t lie in the premise or the story line, but in its many masterfully observed details. Knocked Up is 129 minutes long and composed almost entirely of genius throwaway moments. One instant classic is the scene in which Rogen’s character looks to his father for advice. Harold Ramis is the perfect choice to play the old man — whose words of wisdom aren’t too shabby, either. When the kid whines that this isn’t what he planned for his life, Ramis responds, “Life doesn’t care about our plans.”
There isn’t space enough here to hint at the comic contributions of Rogen’s pothead roommates. A movie made about any one of them would be funnier than anything the National Lampoon franchise has produced in decades. Then there’s Heigl’s henpecked brother-in-law, played by a never-better Paul Rudd. The sequence in which he and Rogen bond while doing ’shrooms at a Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas is a hilarious string of non sequiturs. Kristen Wiig, who plays Heigl’s passive-aggressive supervisor at E!, is a trip unto herself.
The list goes on, but, as I say, continuing it would leave no room to extol the pleasures of Apatow’s confidently laid-back direction, the script’s bounty of choice dialogue or the uniformly amusing performances from the film’s four central actors. Perhaps the picture’s most pleasant surprise, though, is its positive, life-affirming vibe. Without so much as a cliché or cornball moment, it manages to succeed as both a raunchfest and a celebration of responsibility. When he first gets the news, Rogen is convinced life as he knows it is over. By the time the closing credits roll, he understands the best by far is yet to come.
