Product: Funny People
Rating: 5.0
Jake LaMotta would've made a hell of a comedian
Judd Apatow's Funny People is going to divide audiences (it certainly has divided critics). Those going in expecting a comedy along the lines of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up or any other of the films in the Apatow-verse will enjoy it but not love it. But that reaction may be more a product of the misdirection in the marketing of the film than anything else. Funny People is going for something more emotionally complex, and it succeeds on that count.Without dwelling on plot, the film focuses, by and large, on the professional and personal lives of a group of comics and comic actors at various rungs of the show business ladder, from Adam Sandler's George Simmons, a hugely successful film comedy star who came out of the stand-up comedy world, to Seth Rogan's Ira Wright, a novice comic who is drawn into George's world, to Ira's friends, who are his roommates, who are his competitors.The common thread running through these characters is anger and aggression, both explicit and sublimated. They steal jokes, jobs and women from each other (listed here in order of importance to the comics). The relationship between the performers and their audiences is similarly complicated (it's become a cliched observation that comics talk about "killing" the crowd).Interestingly, although all the comedians share this anger and aggression, it's only those who ride those dark emotions into similarly dark comedy that have preserved their spark. The farther the comics stray from their anger, the worse their comedy - as evidenced by Sandler's character, who churns out family-friendly claptrap and co-star Jason Schwartzman's Yo, Teach!, a self-important sitcom (both brilliantly captured in clips woven into Funny People).In Funny People, comedy is the universal language by which these emotionally-constricted characters communicate. There are awkward hugs and half-hearted attempts at compassion, but the most tender moment, coming late in the film, involves one character expressing love by writing jokes for another.All this aside, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that this is a funny, entertaining, emotionally-involving film. But that said, in an odd way, Funny People echoes Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. Both films are about angry and aggressive people who channel those drives in socially acceptable ways. (Even more oddly, Billy Crystal's horrific and mawkish Mr. Saturday Night attempted more overtly to be the Raging Bull of comedy, and the less said about that effort the better.)It wasn't until the ride home from the movie that it occurred to me that the "funny" in the title Funny People could have two meanings; there's funny ha-ha, and funny-odd. Here, the people are intentionally, compellingly both.