Funny People

Seriously, Apatow tries: But Sandler puts the fun in ‘Funny People’

July 31, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

It is, I guess, an unbreakable law of show business physics that if you keep telling someone he’s a comedy genius, he’ll disavow the comedy and obsess about the genius. He’ll get serious, as if the gift of transporting audiences with laughter weren’t profound enough on its own. Down this road have gone Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Robin Williams, and many, many more, and now it’s Judd Apatow’s turn. Apatow, the director of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin’’ and writer-producer of countless bad-lad farces, may not stand with the above company, but at the moment he’s about the best we’ve got, and “Funny People’’ is his cri de coeur. Today’s lesson: Being funny isn’t any fun.

Correction: Being a world-famous, fabulously successful Hollywood comedi an is no fun. Forgive me if I have trouble whipping up the appropriate sympathy. “Funny People,’’ which is deadly earnest beneath its scum of raunchy dialogue, tells the tale of George Simmons (Adam Sandler), an A-list star of blockbuster comedies with titles like “Merman’’ and “Re-Do.’’ He lives in an empty mansion, has no friends, and is more or less a self-absorbed jerk. He has also just been informed he has a rare and probably fatal blood disease.

You’re thinking: OK, now George will spend the rest of the movie learning to hug puppies, and when he befriends one such puppy, a struggling stand-up comic named Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), the pieces of his redemption seem in place. What’s notionally good about “Funny People’’ is that Apatow knows it’s not that easy - that Hollywood Scrooges stay Scrooged, no matter how much trendy psychobabble they talk.

What’s best about “Funny People,’’ actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface. George is genuinely unpleasant in private yet profanely hilarious in public; because he lives for the crowd, he has no interest in individuals. Sandler knows something about this, I think, and while his range as a serious actor is extremely narrow, he can cut surprisingly deep within those limits. This is his best dramatic work by far, conveying the dead-eyed piteousness of a George Simmons without begging us to like him.