Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Judd Apatow has become Hollywood's chronicler of post-industrial masculine panic. The thread that sews Apatow's movies together (10 since 2005, either as a producer, writer or director) is the arrested development of the modern American male. His men are mired in a state of near inertness: copious flab testifies to physical idleness, dialogue reveals an encyclopedia of pop culture minutia. As for wooing the ladies, why expose yourself to rejection when there's so much free Internet porn? The Apatow hero puts bros before hos; if you can rattle off Cat Steven's Islamic name, the boys will always have you around.

Apatow's genius is to bring a certain literary sense to his man-boys — as much as movies featuring tiny flaccid penises and dissertations on Russian hookers' assholes can be "literary." In other words, he's the dirty cinematic version of Nick Hornby. Anthony Lane once remarked that the movie adaptation of About a Boy sums up the entire Hornby canon, and the observations extend to Apatow. The Hornby/Apatow hero is a feckless 30-something clinging to his early 20s. A thin cloud of melancholy hangs over the Hornby/Apatow hero, whose most endearing qualities are wit ("Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians," "McLovin? What, are you trying to be an Irish R&B; singer?") and sensitivity. For example, About a Boy's Will Freeman may be a "men's magazine cool" guy who invents a son to pick up single moms, but his identification with Kurt Cobain evinces an underlying empathy that separates him from more jocular womanizers. Likewise, The 40 Year Old Virgin's celibacy isn't lameness as much as a rejection of the male asshole culture that breeds commitmentphobes and baby daddies. Ultimately, the hero wants to hang out with and be loved by the "right" girl, who'll appreciate his mixtapes and action figure collections. To get there, though, the culture snob act has to wear out, and the Hornby/Apatow hero has to grow up.

The difference between Hornby and Apatow is that Hornby proves himself the better artist by writing believably and sensitively about females. After winning acclaim with the male-centric novels Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, Hornby began to turn his eye towards fully rounded female characters, like the suicidal mother in About a Boy and the doctor caught in a bad marriage in How to be Good. Apatow has shown no such growth as an artist. As was well-documented in the Knocked Upbacklash, Apatow's films are somewhat sexist. New Yorker critic David Denby correctly identified the overarching theme of Apatow's movies: the "ending of the juvenile male bond" — not the coupling of two equals of the opposite sex. Apatow has thus far not been capable of creating a role worthy of Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, or anything close to the chemistry betwen Tracy and Hepburn. In Knocked Up, Ben and Alison don't really like each other, and to our eyes, never really do. That movie's not about "the civilizing of desire," but the pulling apart of the "male pack." The most tender part of the film is when Ben and Pete share a 'shroomed-up moment in a velvety Vegas hotel room after taking in the Circe de Soleil high, with Pete crying that "the biggest problem in our marriage is that she wants me around. And I can't even accept that? I don't think I can accept pure love." Pete then sticks his fist in his mouth and says it tastes like a rainbow, but we get the point: It's time to grow up and move on with life; such beautiful hijinks are best left as stories told over the barbecue grill at kids' birthday parties.

Alison's desires — beyond her relentess careerism — are rarely addressed in any meaningful way. She is the uptight materialist, the worrywart, the one too busy having it all to be happy. Her best moment is with her sister (Leslie Mann, Apatow's wife) outside a nightclub after being told by the bouncer, "You old, she pregnant. Can't have a bunch of old pregnant bitches running around. That's crazy." Debbie realizes that she has mommy-nagged Pete to Vegas, that her neediness is not sexy: "I get worse looking, and he gets better looking. It's so fucking unfair!" As Slate's Meghan O'Rourke observes, Debbie feels that she's "offered a good deal" that was rejected because Pete can't help but see Spider-Man 3 by himself and play fantasy baseball with the boys. This is her warning to Alison: Ben will never fully give up weed ("Why don't you go fuck your bong!") and dropping obscure pop culture references with the boys. Is this the kind of man you want raising your child?

Fair enough, but as O'Rourke also points out, the ladies' scene "has none of the zany ingenuity of Pete and Ben's scene and lacks the verbal dexterity that peppers women's dialogue in screwball comedies." Apatow's male characters round into complex, fully realized men because they overcome their funny, crude, artfully specific man-boy shenanigans. Apatow's female characters remain static: They are the constant micromanagers of relationship mechanics when they meet their man, as they get to know their man, and after he's grown into a man. This is the soft sexism of Apatow's expectations for his female characters. As Denby asks, "How can he not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don't have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor."

With the latest Apatow-produced feature sitting at 85 percent on the Tomatometer, we have to ask: With Forgetting Sarah Marshall, does Judd Apatow show any real development as an artist? Unfortunately, no. The male lead, Peter, is the most Hornby-esque of any in the Apatow canon, but, again, the lead woman is a two-dimensional shrew. Peter gets all the good jokes, the emotional sensitivity and the lucky twists of fate. Sarah gets the castrating diatribes, the emotional neediness and petty backbiting.

What makes Peter (Jason Segel, who also wrote the script) such a Hornby type? He's bright but underachieving, unsuccessful but not cripplingly poor, self-reflective but with glaring blindspots about himself. His good company makes up for his lack of looks, though he's witty in the company of familiars but shy and morose around people "better" than him. He's a pseudo-musician like High Fidelity's Rob Gordon, the vinyl record store owner and DJ; Peter scores the "ominous tones" for a TV crime show. He's a bit chubby, eats Fruit Loops out of a stainless steel mixing bowl and watches a lot of daytime TV. Peter's the furtherest thing from men's magazine cool; he's the lovable schlub who's unafraid to flex his man boobs in the bathroom mirror.

His unlikely girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), is the hot new star of Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime, a brainless CSI knocoff that features Billy Baldwin delivering lines like "Looks like where he's going, he'll need to know how to masturbate." We assume she and Peter met at the beginning of the show's run, but, strangely, we know very little of their relationship. From what we see, Peter's contribution to the relationship has been to hold her purse while standing just out of camera shot on the red carpet, whereas Sarah has given Peter tupperware to keep his beloved cereal fresh. That's almost all we're given to work with when Peter infamously drops trou after the opening credits.

The male nudity is quintessential Apatow: profane, but not pointless. Peter's emotional nakedness hangs bare, both his face and his schlong registering not just the pain of losing his girlfriend, but also the fact that he was playing way over his head. At first, this smells like a condescending King of Queens-style fat guy/hot chick fantasy, but Segel's character really sells the conceit. Peter cries a lot — really, every five minutes or so: post-coital during a one night stand, watching TV in the apartment, opening that special tupperware.

This is where Peter becomes the most Hornby-esque of any Apatow character. Hornby's books have been called "male confessionals" because he's unafraid to show the loneliness and pain of guys in their alone moments. Knocked Up's Ben was rarely alone (he lived in a slacker commune), but Peter's solo apartment is so dingy, cluttered and full of comforters to wrap up and bawl in. He plays the Muppet Show theme on his piano, only to collapse onto the keyboard in tears. Peter is so distraught that it seems entirely reasonable to take off for Hawaii.

Segel has big, sad eyes, and he's remarkably engaged with whoever else is on screen. Too often, comedic actors perform material rather than act — think Jim Carrey or Matthew McConaughey. Jason Segel is much closer to Steve Carrell than Seth Rogen: Too often, Rogen performed at, not with, Katherine Heigl, but Carrell played Andy Spitzer seriously, like he wasn't a walking punch line. This generosity gives his co-stars the space to create memorable moments: Paul Rudd as the idiot-Zen surf instructor ("Do less!"), Jonah Hill as the waiter with a man-crush on Sarah's new crotch-thrusting rock-star boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) and Jack McBrayer as the evangelical honeymooner who objects to cunnilingus because God put our mouths on our head, not next to the sewer system.

You'll notice, of course, that these performances (along with several others) are all men. The female leads, Bell and Mila Kunis, don't really register as anything more than sexy macguffins. When Peter lands in Hawaii only to find Sarah at the same hotel, he's bailed out by hottie desk clerk Rachel (Kunis), who offers him the Oprah-rate suite that nobody stays in during the week. They begin hanging out, of course, and a generous reviewer would say that you can see why she finds him attractive. Still, he's a bit too pathetic (he's still stalking Sarah around the hotel) and she's a tad too gorgeous to fully suspend our belief. Nonetheless, they get along, and Segel's screenplay even grants her a bit of a backstory about how she ended up in Hawaii. But just as in Knocked Up, her story doesn't have enough imagination and specificity to round her into a real character. She followed a bad boyfriend and ended up in a dead-end job, simple as that. Kunis has a few moments (she coerces Peter into performing a Dracula ballad at a bar), but the material fails her.

Worse is the Sarah Marshall character. Kristen Bell seems game, but she gets virtually no jokes, outside of her CSI parodies — which, even then, belong almost entirely to Baldwin. Peter tells us Sarah is sweet, but other than that blessed tupperware, we don't really see it. She dumps him, runs off with a rock star and then tries to make Peter's new flame jealous. Sarah has one speech in which she chastizes Peter for not noticing how she changed for him, but even that seems disengenious when we find out what other awful things she did behind his back. Sarah takes an even more needy and insecure turn in the last act of the movie; ultimately we're supposed to realize that schlubby Peter was too good for hot actress Sarah. Fair enough, but Sarah Marshall comes off as such a bitch that movie becomes, again, almost sexist. Rather than showing two people who've just grown apart and have to come to terms with that, the film steers Sarah into the ditch so that we're more sympathetic to the guy's plight.

If Sarah had the same level of likability and sensitivity as Peter, then we've got an adult comedy about the painful evolution of relationships. As it stands, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is another Judd Apatow-produced film that can't figure out women. Just look at how Apatow handles nudity — Peter's dropped towel is an expression of his emotional fragility; Sarah Marshall's bikini is an expression of how smokin' hot her bod is — living up (or down) to just what Denby said about women offering their bodies in movies like Knocked Up. Until Apatow finds writers and directors who can draw female characters with the same depth as his men, he may keep raking in the box office — but he'll be stuck as an one-dimensional artist. Rob Gordon's top five list of Apatow movies won't have a single memorable woman.