The cycles of pop culture spin at a bewildering speed. It’s been seven years since “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and five since “Knocked Up,” the films with which Judd Apatow single-handedly launched a new mode of comedy precisely by making it less, um, single-handed: he brought comic people together and encouraged to them to be funny, each in their own way. By unleashing comedians’ improvisational gifts in feature films, he instantly made other contemporary comedies seem stodgy. And as a producer, he oversaw such ingenious spinoffs as “Superbad” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which sparked some fine careers. Apatow infused those films with his own sensibility—a hedonistic humanism in which knowledge in the Biblical sense becomes an arduous path to empathy and wisdom. (And in the great—repeat, great—“Funny People,” from 2009, Apatow subjects his own swinging world to vast moral pressure, both high and low.)
Now there’s “Wanderlust,” on which Apatow was one of the three producers (along with its star Paul Rudd and co-star and co-writer, Ken Marino). The movie is directed by David Wain, and it’s reminiscent of Wain’s previous film, “Role Models,” from 2008. Apatow had no official connection to that film, but three of its stars, Paul Rudd, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Jane Lynch, are from his cinematic circle, and the freewheeling performances of its inspired comic performers (including Ken Jeong) are reminiscent of those that he elicits. “Role Models” and “Wanderlust” have similar formats: in both, Rudd is the straight man, the core of flummoxed ordinariness who anchors and reflects the antics in his midst.
“Wanderlust” seems old. Sure, there are a few funny bits (not as many as there should be, and not as many as some people are saying there are), but the very feel of it is overly familiar, and the movie doesn’t really come to life until the blooper outtakes that play with the credits. Here’s why: comic improvisation—specifically, the ribald outrageousness that it aims for—has become too commonplace. At this point, nothing short of a huge dick bursting through the screen would shock an audience with comical sexual audacity. And, as for improvisation itself—well, to quote Leonard Cohen, everybody knows.
A key to modern cinema is its reflexivity. Audiences have a basic knowledge of how movies are made—everyone gets the idea of shooting and editing—and the riffing of “Wanderlust,” even when it’s funny, comes virtually packaged with its offscreen space. The viewers understand that these actors are riffing, and that the editors and producers have put out one version of many, a hit among the misfires that took place on set. The outtakes don’t so much undercut the film that came before it (as they might undercut a tightly packed Cary Grant comedy) as supersede it. The looseness of the last decade of quasi-improvisational comedies has suddenly come to seem like a tight format.
The Duplass brothers’ “Cyrus,” from 2010, which starred two more actors from Apatow’s realm, Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly, is comic in tone but darkly melodramatic in essence. Now they’re returning with “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” starring Jason Segel (who, of course, has been an Apatow associate since “Freaks and Geeks”), about which, more soon (it comes out on March 16th). The Duplasses don’t quite renew comedy, but they do break through the edges of its frame.
What’s good in “Wanderlust” is the kernel of melodrama from which the comedy grows—the bourgeois blues. Jennifer Aniston, who co-stars with Rudd, is, to my mind, fundamentally a realistic and melodramatic performer, one whose smile always breaks through a mist of tears. She’s a genre unto herself (but one that Kristen Wiig, with “Bridesmaids,” is closing in on), and her presence suggests the possibility of emotional stings that the movie hardly delivers on (the best parts of the film are in the setup scenes of urban frustration and suburban malaise). A great thing about Apatow’s films is that they all have a central element of melodrama; it was there in the missing hour of hard relationship work in “Knocked Up” (which I call the Cassavetes hour); it’s the heart of “Funny People”; and I suspect that it will be revived, and even heightened, in Apatow’s upcoming film, “This Is 40,” which stars Rudd and Leslie Mann (who played the married couple in “Knocked Up”).
The American comedy is, once again, awaiting renewal. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apatow himself has a hand in achieving it, as both director and producer. He’s an executive producer of “Girls,” the HBO series starring and directed by Lena Dunham, whose film “Tiny Furniture” is the reflection of a distinctive—and morally self-questioning—worldview. That movie unfolds the uneasy choices that go into a young person’s assumption of an artistic career. It has its reflexivity built into it; I’m impatient to see what she does in “Girls,” and beyond.
