Sweet (Love) Child o' Mine

Knocked Up births impregnable belly laughs.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

BABY BLUES: Alison (Katherine Heigl) and Ben (Seth Rogen) ponder unplanned parenthood. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Judd Apatow loves to drag overgrown manchildren kicking and screaming into adulthood, but first, he likes to get down in the sandbox with them. Like The 40 Year Old Virgin, which he wrote and directed, and the string of Will Ferrell vehicles he produced (Anchorman, Kicking & Screaming, Talladega Nights), Knocked Up focuses on a lovable loser whose social ineptness and retarded maturation is matched only by his pureness of heart.

His doughy frame topped by a thicket of unruly curls, Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) may be the least ambitious person on Earth � and he doesn't seem even slightly worried about it. Sharing a pad with three similarly inert lumps, he smokes weed, scrolls through DVDs for the dirty parts, and, well, that's about it. (Technically, the DVD scrolling is the groundwork for an Internet start-up, but it doesn't seem like any of them take it that seriously.) As far as he's concerned, his life is just about perfect. That's until he meets Alison (Katherine Heigl), an aspiring E! reporter who's a tailored suit to his thrift-store tee.

Ben and Alison don't meet-cute so much as get soused. They hit the same club on the same night, drink till they're stupid, have bad-idea sex and think better of it the next morning. But a few months and skipped periods later, she reluctantly gets back in touch, yanking Ben awkwardly into adulthood. But unlike The 40 Year Old Virgin, it's not a simple case of an experienced older woman giving a frightened but well-meaning man a chance to catch up with her. Although Alison is considerably more on the ball than Ben, she's no more certain about the direction she wants her life to take. She may have had a plan, but this isn't it.

Apatow is most at ease in Ben's world, a universe of nonstop wisecracks and loose-limbed improvisation. There's a riotous running gag involving one of his roommates, who's made a bet that he can go a year without shaving or getting a haircut. Every time the poor schmuck walks into a room, someone makes a new crack about his shaggy appearance. The things they call him � "Charles Manson," "Late John Lennon" � aren't that funny in and of themselves, but Apatow flawlessly captures the punch-in-the-arm camaraderie of young men who'd sooner push one another down a flight of stairs than admit to any affection for each other.

Mostly veterans of Apatow's TV series' Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel and Martin Starr act as if they've spent countless long nights passing the bong and shooting the shit. (It can't hurt that every one of the actors playing a character in his early 20s is actually in his early 20s, which may be some sort of Hollywood first.)

The movie is on less sure ground when it comes to Alison's world. Sharing a house with her older sister Debbie and brother-in-law Pete (Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd) and their two children, her life doesn't offer nearly as many opportunities for off-the-wall humor. Pete and Debbie's marriage is strained � she's panicked about the ravages of his age, and he may be having an affair � and Apatow struggles to find the right tone for it. You sense that he, like Ben, is trying to mature, and not having an easy time of it. (You wonder if it helps or hurts that, apart from Rudd, he's basically working with his own family: He's married to Mann and the kids are played by their kids.)

If Apatow struggles with the movie's more dramatic passages � and despite its billing as a raucous comedy, there are quite a few � it's because he's a brilliant enabler of comedians but borderline-incompetent as a film director. Knocked Up opens with a pro forma montage of the various characters starting their days: Alison waking up to her alarm, Pete taking care of his kids, Ben rolling out of bed. It's the kind of thing any competent TV director could slam together in an afternoon. But this simple little sequence is excruciating to watch, because it appears to have been shot with absolutely no thought as to how the scenes would cut together.

Virgin played as if Apatow had simply let his actors improvise the hell out of every scene and then cut it together after the fact � a workable strategy for a straight-up comedy, if one that still contained a few off-key set pieces. But Knocked Up is pushing for poignancy as well as belly laughs, and the movie doesn't have the structure to sustain both. That's not to say it's not both funny and touching, but the two sometimes seem to be at odds, as if Ben and Alison's lives were two separate movies edited together. The two sides smash into each other with a birth scene that could have been conceived by the Farrelly brothers, but it's otherwise hard to get a handle on what kind of movie Knocked Up wants to be. Either film could have been a good one, but together they're less than whole.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Knocked Up

Written and directed by Judd ApatowA Universal Pictures release