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Knocked Up
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: June 6, 2007

Much as I enjoy lousy movies, good ones are usually a lot more fun. Meanwhile, seeing a great movie for the first time is a rare and wonderful thing. Week after week, one gets accustomed to making concessions, filling in blanks, and supplying the filmgoing experience with some compensation or another, where a director, an actor, or a screenwriter has fallen short of excellence. But a great film doesn’t need any help from the viewer. No apologies are made, or required. The movie simply takes you for a joyride, until the ride ends, and you want to get on again.

Knocked Up is just such a movie. I cleared my calendar for this film a while ago, figuring if it was half as good as Judd Apatow’s previous comedy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, it would still be a quality film. But Knocked Up isn’t half as good… it’s twice as good. Certainly both films borrow from the Something About Mary formula: raunchy humor, tempered and validated by intelligent and sincere ruminations on the blessings of maturity. But unlike its predecessors, Knocked Up doesn’t ever veer into the absurd. It’s simply a coming of age story that happens to be relentlessly funny.

Knocked Up stars Seth Rogan as Ben, a committed slacker and pot smoker with a big heart and just enough dutifulness to equip him for a crisis. Katherine Heigl plays Allison, a career-minded beauty with a remarkable ability to play the hand she’s dealt. The two meet in a bar and hook up for some drunken, un-protected sex. Afterwards, they go their separate ways, but when Allison discovers she’s pregnant, they reconvene and decide to forge a relationship where none yet exists.

Judd Apatow’s screenplay is outstanding. It’s hilarious, and at the same time has enough insight into its subject matter to qualify it as an actual public service. It also gives itself plenty of room to breathe, as much of the riffing between characters feels improvised, creating an infectious, organic cadence. Seth Rogan is perfect as the reluctant leading man, and all of the supporting roles are effortlessly inhabited by various charming upstart doofus comics. Meanwhile, Apatow is equally comfortable with his female characters, who are frequently hysterically fed up with the male of the species. Leslie Mann, as Allison’s sister Debbie, nearly steals the movie when she takes all her frustrations out on a bouncer at a night club. And Katherine Heigl, though charged with holding things together as the film’s “straight man,” still manages to launch a few zingers, for instance when she tells Ben to go fuck his bong.

One extraordinary quality of this film is the way it conveys sincere warmth and affection for all of its characters, even while those characters endlessly abuse and berate each other. No matter who is being nasty onscreen, we are never permitted to lose our fondness for them. The comedic freedom of this environment really elevates the spirit, as does the truthful duality expressed by the project as a whole. Without actually endorsing or justifying mean-spiritedness, Apatow lavishly celebrates the wicked tongue. Love, his movie tells us, comes from the heart. Sentences, meanwhile, are harmless… just the blowing off of steam.

Even more remarkable is the intelligence with which Ben’s journey into adulthood is illustrated. It would have been easy to simply let this character rise to the occasion and fulfill his duty to mother and child. Another cliché would be the obligatory repudiation of the slacker lifestyle, some bogus epiphany that hanging out and being lazy is somehow not actually completely wonderful. Knocked Up is much smarter than all that. Apatow knows that real maturity is neither a suppression, nor an antithesis, but an eclipsing of youth, when we realize our habits and impulses have become obstacles to our happiness. By the end of this film Ben still longs to be a kid. But not as much as he wants to be a man.

Knocked Up is one for the ages, a comedy on par with Groundhog Day and As Good as it Gets. It’s crudely funny and tastefully sentimental, and effortlessly so from start to finish. Folks, all the so-so movies out there can wait for your Netflix list. Go see this one instead. You’re gonna laugh.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld