Plays the Consumerism Game and Releases Astute Communication

Rating: 8/10 (2 March 2008)

Knocked Up did its applaudably, insightfully wise job. It lured its conventional teen target consumers into a hard-to-miss universal social commentary. It is stunningly enlightening and intelligent, not in a vernacular or high-brow sense but emboldeningly sharp in its assertion of wisdom and sensibility within the mainstream American culture of regular pop culture-driven people of today.
Judd Apatow is so honest and wise in his portrayal of the all-American knocked-up situation, that everything makes sense despite how stupid things are. Take for example the most obvious and necessary scene in the movie, which is when Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl get drunk and wind up at her house having sex. Rogen is battling to maintain an erection and fit a condom on while keeping the pace. Heigl gets impatient and says, "Just do it!" Of course, she's trying to speed up the fastening of the condom. But also of course, he interprets that as "Forget the condom, let's go." This clearly pivotal moment in the movie could so easily have been botched.
Apatow is very much above the stick figure story. See, a lot of the time when Hollywood wants to make a commercial movie with a message pertaining to an oft-confronted conflict in or because of American culture, they simply take a classic scenario and fill in the blanks, which would just be character names, place, et cetera. Knocked Up begins with its characters. It also sets the stage for hilarity at their expense. Rogen is not just a horny American Pie party animal. He's an immature Jewish Canadian who is building a website of all the great nudie film scenes with his LA pothead friends. He lives there and doesn't pay taxes, living on an injury settlement. Heigl is a competent, together, motivated woman who is promoted anchorwoman for E! TV and lives with her sister, who is married with a family. She goes to a nightclub because she is rewarding herself with a good time and he goes to the same nightclub because he and his friends spontaneously decided to go. This pairing is an extremely socially and psychologically perceptive comic manipulation. Their occupations and immediate social personalities are specifically and deeply opposing.
It's not just a farce, however. It takes itself seriously. Seth Rogen's character's personality is actually a good model for describing the climate of the film. It's hilarious with a whip-smart sense of timing and comeback, yet it isn't simply a breezy clown because there's so much aggression and passion behind it's sense of humor. This leaves room for the most comfortable and considerate poignancy in a Hollywood movie directed at young people in years. All of the couple's fears and mutually irritating idiosyncracies naturally threaten the delicate situation that they try so hard to take with a grain of salt, and their own friends and family become infected with the same feelings between each other. Heigl's sister, played by Leslie Mann, is in the most typical hetero marriage in the world: an unhappy one. And because of their close sibling relationship, their instabilities and uncertainties complement each other.
Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen are hilarious together and Jonah Hill, whose natural over- the-topness works well in the subsequent Apatow/Rogen film Superbad, here playing one of Rogen's stoner friends, whips out many a razor-sharp laugh line. The dialogue in this film is so absorbing, hilarious, smart, rhythmic and quotable that David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, Neil Simon, and Dashiell Hammett are surely seeking to visit Apatow for inspiration. No, I wouldn't rank Knocked Up with the likes of Glengarry Glen Ross, Pulp Fiction, The Goodbye Girl or To Have and Have Not, but it's certainly the cinematic speech beat for the present American pop culture. It has its fingers vigorously pressing against its pulse.
I know I'm building this film up a wee bit, and I should in all fairness report that the movie struggles to begin. The first five minutes or so strike dread into one's heart because the rap blaring over the soundtrack, the shots of Rogen and his buddies partying, and Heigl's existing-condition life look like one's in for a simple coasting through Hollywood 16-to-25 age group fluff. Nevertheless it certainly overpowers its brief early expectation by a landslide.