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.