There’s a moment in the new comedy, “This is 40,” that sells the whole move. Debbie, the wife, tries to pull Pete, the husband, off of a hospital bed. She is, in a roundabout way, responsible for him being there. But so is he. Anyway, as she playfully makes a go of picking him up, he places his right hand on the back of her head, pulls her face to his and kisses her. It’s a long kiss, one that says, “I love you. I’m glad you’re with me. We’re in this crazy thing called life together, and we’re going to get through it. I wouldn’t do anything else for even a minute if it meant being without you.”
It’s a great moment in a uneven movie.
Pete and Debbie are Every Couple. They fight incessantly. They don’t listen to one another. They keep secrets from each other. There’s an undercurrent of resentment in many of the things they do and say. And maybe he stayed with her all those years ago because she got pregnant with their first child.
Their respective families are a 26-volume encyclopedia of dysfunction. Pete’s father mooches endlessly from him, which Pete hides from his wife, even as his business fails and he skips house payments. Debbie’s father is stiff and unemotional, and hasn’t seen her for seven years, even though they appear to live in the same city.
Debbie hides in the bushes to smoke. Pete hides in the bathroom to escape. Then they scream at each other about smoking and escaping to the bathroom.
And yet, beneath all of that, they love each other.
That Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann are able to make the love, anger and resentment Peter and Debbie feel evident in what appear to be mostly improvised scenes is a tribute to their skills as actors. This is a Judd Apatow (“Knocked Up” and “40-year-old Virgin”) movie, which means he made up a lot of it as he went. But Rudd and Mann have a way of creating moments that feel real. Like the kiss.
Little of what happens to Paul and Debbie is funny. They’re looking back at wasted time, wondering how they wound up in the chaos that is their lives, and trying, rather pathetically, to figure out how to make things better. Their conversations are tense and loud. They bounce from passive aggressive to aggressive and back to passive again.
So, for comedy relief, Apatow brought in Jason Segel and Albert Brooks. I didn’t like Segel. Oh, he has a couple of zingers, but most of his improv relies too heavily on sexual humor and four letter words. Many of the so-called laughs in the movie are the same way, and that’s not my cup of tea. I don’t get the humor, or the art, in an actress making up a graphic joke about being numb “down there,” and how she wouldn’t feel a thing if she fell on a fire hydrant. Maybe her timing was off. You could tell she was stumbling through it.
But Brooks. Oh man, was he funny. Most of the good jokes are his, and depend not on talking nasty but on wit and timing. Brooks plays Pete’s dad, a 60-year-old man who married a younger woman and then had triplets. In one scene, he complains to Pete about how he didn’t want more children at his age. “My wife wanted kids. What was I going to say? She would have left me if I’d said no. But the doctor that was doing the in vitro winked at me, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ so I played along.” You have to hear Brooks say the line. It’s hilarious.
Then he says “I could never open up to my wife. She’d leave me.” That made me sad.
Like a middle-aged man who needs to drop a few pounds, there’s a lot of fat in “This is 40.” Things meander, plot points are left unresolved and some of the improv is awkward. But there’s a lot of truth, too, and some really funny lines. “This is 40” is a lot like life - rough around the edges and appallingly bad at times, but also too good to simply write off.
Rated R for sexual content, crude humor, pervasive language and some drug material. Three stars out of four.