This is 40
★★★
(2012)
Producer/Director Judd Apatow curates Americas most watched comedy films. Not counting the dozens of films he has produced, since 2004 his own output (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Funny People) have all had a sharp focus on three same themes; Age, sex and fear, not necessarily in that order. His Latest finds Knocked Up sub-plot couple Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) facing the big four oh, money problems and their quickly growing, rebellious children. With less of an infatuation with bodily fluids This is 40 sees Apatow at his sweetest, most personal, but to be harsh, perhaps his most comically boring.
Pete's record label is failing, someone is steeling money from Debbie's clothing store, Pete's leaching father (Albert Brooks) is not helping and the couple's love life has hit the skids. The pair hide their vices from each other and as Pete scoffs Cup cakes over the sink and Debbie sneaks out for a cigarette Apatow paints a couple heading into their second seven-year itch, attempting to head through life's little ageing problems without losing the respect of their friends, family and children. Though it's not exactly virgin territory, for Apatow or the audience, there is enough of This is 40 to find something to like.
It is long (as most of Apatows films are) for a family comedy but it's filled with sweet sketch like moments which, though hit and miss, make the films running time nothing to worry about. Rudd is loveable as Pete and Apatows off screen wife Mann and their two off-screen children add a realness and honesty to the performances which lift it slightly above the average midlife crisis flick. Albert Brookes and John Lithgow lend a hand as the overbearing and the never their father figures, respectively. Megan Fox turns up as something of an over sexualised red herring and there are a number of other familiar faces popping in to This is 40 from Apatows world including Chris O'Dowd and Bridesmaids' Melissa McCarthy.
As Pete's music business disappears he fights gallantly hard to keep his own youthful spark alive, latching on to an old musical love and attempting to get him back to the top and, while he talks to his wife and children about the importance of The Pixies' Doolittle, the girls in his family pop on some Nicki Minaj. "For once, I wish just one of you had a dick", he says, lost in a family of women, detached from his loves and his youth. Even though Pete stereotypically sneaks off to the loo for a bit of lengthy quiet time at important family engagements, Debbie has her own doubts and detachment issues too and Apatow plays them out back to back, never really offering any epiphanies for our struggling couple, even towards the film's end.
The family's money crisis doesn't quite make you care for them as much as it should of course, they never really seem to be in any trouble of losing anything. Some may find Debbie's nagging a little too much and the polar opposite kids and fathers don't really ever gel. People will have problems with the film. We did, but you can't help admire perhaps the boldest move and the biggest mistake in This is 40 when Apatow offers no real feel-good finale, instead he seems to suggest that we're all in this thing together alone.
