Mid-life crisis | 14 February 2013

This is 40. Or perhaps I should say, is this 40? I haven’t yet reached that rounded age myself, so don’t have much of a frame of reference. But a quick spin around Wikipedia reveals that the film’s writer-director Judd Apatow (45) and its two stars, Leslie Mann (40) and Paul Rudd (43), all have the requisite number of years on them. They must know what they’re talking about, mustn’t they?

Mann and Rudd play Debbie and Pete, a married couple who first appeared in one of the best comedies of the last decade, Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007). And their relationship is summed up by the film’s poster: Pete squats on the toilet, iPad in hand, while Debbie looks on askance through the bathroom mirror. They’re so close to each other that they can practically feel the bowel movements, but perhaps too close for things such as passion, mystery and excitement. And it doesn’t help that they have two daughters — one entering her teenage years — constantly nagging at each other in the background.

So, back to that question: is this 40? Readers with experience in this particular area should write in with their answers, but for now I’ll just quote Apatow himself. ‘Nothing in the movie feels specifically true, it didn’t happen to us,’ is how he put it in a recent interview with Movieline, ‘but the emotions are very truthful, the feelings and the conflicts are all based on things that we relate to.’ Well, we know that Apatow must relate to it. He’s married to Leslie Mann in real life. The daughters in the film are their two actual daughters. In these respects, This Is 40 is an extraordinarily personal endeavour.

But the problem is, I’m not sure whether many other 40-year-olds will relate to Apatow’s version of the truth. Yes, Debbie and Pete bicker, scratch and fart — but otherwise they’re far too polished to be normal. Their stomachs are the combined product of a million sit-ups, their teeth are a glistening testament to Beverly Hills dentistry, their hair shines and shines and shines. At one point — despite, apparently, suffering from financial problems — they take their high-end BMW to an equally high-end hotel where they eat hash cookies and order everything on the room-service menu. Really? That’s when I properly started to suspect that this is 40 in the same way that Friends was twentysomething life in New York. Which is to say, not at all.

This shouldn’t matter, you might think: we don’t usually shuffle into Hollywood comedies expecting realism and grit. Yet somehow, in the case of This Is 40, it mattered to me. I can only put it down to the pat universalism of the film’s title. It promises the human condition, but seems only to deliver the manicured and conditioned. Hand over your ten pounds, feel like a sucker.

Besides, This Is 40 is flawed in other ways, particularly its pacing. It has the same freewheeling, improvisational style as other Apatow movies — but here, thanks to some unpropitious alignment of the stars, it merely comes across as lazy and unfocused. Too many characters drawl through too many lines. Too many detours are taken. And by the time the inevitable we’ve-been-so-
silly-I-love-you-really ending comes around you’ve long since given up caring. It plays like a full-stop that has been inserted into the script at random, and which could have arrived on any page.

All of this is a great shame, not least because This Is 40 has some redeeming features. For all their polish, Mann and Rudd are very likeable performers who wring as many laughs from the script as they can. And then there’s Megan Fox, who pulls off a rare mix of lip-gloss sexiness and self-deprecation, just as she did in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) and Jennifer’s Body (2009). The camera leers at her several times too often, though — particularly during one breast-related scene that’s probably already lighting up some less salubrious corners of the internet.

Overall, then, I hope this isn’t 40. I’d take the BMW, the massive house and the perfect teeth, but all the rest seems spasmodic and faltering, too geriatric for its age. Let’s chalk it up as a mid-life crisis on Apatow’s part.