Why are you asking me?”) The absence of a credible model of male adulthood is clearly one of the forces trapping Ben and his friends in their state of blithe immaturity. “Just tell me what to do,” he begs, but no help is forthcoming. What Alison doesn’t realize - partly because he doesn’t quite either - is that Ben wouldn’t mind changing, if only he could figure out how.Īt a moment of crisis Ben calls his father, a nice, tolerant guy played by Harold Ramis, for advice. She does not entirely trust him, but she likes him enough to worry about forcing him to change his ways. When he learns that Alison has decided to keep the baby - there is a funny, knowing riff on the reluctance of movies and television shows even to use the word “abortion” - he seems genuinely delighted.Īlison is somewhat more hesitant, not about the incipient child but about staying with Ben, whose hold on maturity is less sure than his grip on his favorite bong. Rather than being afraid of commitment, Ben appears fascinated by the idea, as if it were a distant land chronicled in legend and song. But that’s not quite how “Knocked Up” plays.
When one of Ben’s sperm, showing more initiative than the man who produced it (and taking advantage of an all-too-believable moment of condom carelessness) hits the reproductive jackpot, the stage seems to be set for a comedy of male panic.
#Knocked up series#
Apatow, a creator of some of the best-loved, least-watched series in recent television history (notably “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared”), has a sly way of subverting these familiar touchstones. There is, as I’ve suggested, a certain familiarity to much of this: the bickering married couple the competent, attractive young woman yoked to a slovenly and unambitious young man the geeky slackers who communicate entirely through allusions to movies, comic books and old television shows. Apatow finds an unlikely route back into romance, a road that passes through failure and humiliation on its meandering way toward comic bliss. Starting, as he did in “Virgin,” from a default position of anti-romantic cynicism, Mr. What it does feel is honest: about love, about sex, and above all about the built-in discrepancies between what men and women expect from each other and what they are likely to get. It is sharp but not mean, sweet but not soft, and for all its rowdy obscenity it rarely feels coarse or crude. The wonder of “Knocked Up” is that it never scolds or sneers.
While this movie’s barrage of gynecology-inspired jokes would have driven the prudes at the old Hays Office mad, its story, about a young man trying to do what used to be the very definition of the Right Thing, might equally have brought a smile of approval to the lips of the starchiest old-Hollywood censor. Apatow’s earlier film, it attaches dirty humor to a basically upright premise. It may be a bit, um, premature to say so, but Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up” strikes me as an instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.
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