June 1, 2007

• Knocked Up

  ‘Knocked Up’

  ..> ..>

  Katherine Heigl portrays Alison, who gets more than she bargains for from a celebratory outing that culminates in a one-night stand.

  Photo Credit: Photos By Suzanne Hanover — Universal

  First Comes a Baby Carriage
  ‘Knocked Up’ Casts a Wary, Witty Eye on Modern Love
  

  By Ann Hornaday
  Washington Post Staff Writer
  Friday, June 1, 2007; C05
  

  Following up on his 2005 summer hit “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” writer-director Judd Apatow takes his signature raunchy, dumb-but-smart rudeness to the next level in “Knocked Up,” a coming-of-age comedy in which the adolescent protagonist happens to be in his late 20s.

  Apatow, who created the brilliant television series “Freaks and Geeks,” has a knack for evoking the joys and terrors of life’s most perilous passages. In “Knocked Up,” he delivers the same vulgar, aren’t-we-stinkers jokes about men, and druggy, slack-happy humor that are his stock in trade for his teenage fans. But older viewers will be more tuned in to his lacerating observations about the endless capitulations that define midlife. “Marriage is like an unfunny, tense version of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ ” a character offers at one point.

  If you’ve seen the ads, you’ve seen the movie: Katherine Heigl (TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy”) plays Alison, an up-and-coming TV executive who, celebrating her promotion during a night out with her sister (Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann), gets drunk and ends up in bed with a dumpy lumpen-dude named Ben, played by Seth Rogen. There’s a big misunderstanding about a condom (and the precise meaning of “Just do it already”), and bingo, their one-night stand turns into a nine-month nightmare of facing the music and growing up fast.

  Rogen, a supporting actor known for his work in past Apatow productions, is thrust into the lead, with uneven results. At times, it seems as if he might be his generation’s answer to Albert Brooks, with less neurotic fizz. But his likability never flares into anything more interesting or watchable. (For her part, Heigl is ripe and lovely and little else.)

  Instead, the supporting cast continually threatens to walk away with the picture. Paul Rudd takes on the usual Rogen supporting role, here as Alison’s brother-in-law Pete, whose marriage to Debbie (Mann) is sagging under the weight of two kids and a caul of anger and resentment. (There’s a brief, stingingly eloquent shot of Debbie sleeping on a trundle bed.)

  As usual with Apatow, he’s enlisted a gifted group for the supporting roles, including “Geeks” alums Jason Segel, Martin Starr and James Franco in a cameo. Ryan Seacrest delivers a spot-on jeremiad against the entertainment-industrial complex. In fact, the most memorable moments of “Knocked Up” don’t include Heigl and Rogen. Rather they have to do with Mann’s hilarious encounter with a club bouncer, Rudd breaking into a flawlessly timed version of “Happy Birthday,” and “Saturday Night Live’s” Kristen Wiig playing one of Alison’s colleagues with the sotto voce bitterness of a highly skilled underminer.

  “Knocked Up” is putatively about Alison and Ben’s decision to take responsibility for their actions and get together for the sake of the baby. But they are so drastically mismatched that even when they make a go of it — she relaxes and helps him with his T-and-A Web site, he finally gets a job and stops smoking weed — their romance feels forced and wrong. You get the sense that what Apatow really wants to talk about is what’s going on in the background, where Pete and Debbie engage in the psychosexual gamesmanship that is modern marriage. (Apatow demands some suspension of disbelief when they decide to go through with the pregnancy: Are we to believe that someone as together as Alison doesn’t have a regular OB-GYN? That she would take a guy she barely knows into the examining room with her?) The only person who suggests that Alison get an abortion is her mother, who makes callous mention of a relative who, after she got hers, went on to have a “real baby.”

  The political implications of “Knocked Up” aside, its biggest problem lies at its very narrative core, which is that it’s nearly impossible to root for two people contorting themselves so painfully to pretend that they love each other. When “Knocked Up” finally arrives at its predictably happy ending, Heigl and Rogen haven’t generated any chemistry, and nothing about them or their characters suggests that they’re meant to be together.

  But that’s almost beside the point for a comedy that believes so winningly in getting credit for trying, letting go of your illusions and learning to be happy. As much as “Knocked Up” aspires to end with a hug, it winds up in more of a shrug. Leave it to Apatow to make a deceptively sophisticated meditation on the ambiguities of personal morality — with pot jokes.

  Knocked Up (125 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for sexual content, drug use and profanity.

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