You Can't Bring The Funny Without Experiencing The Pain

There's a scene in the new Judd Apatow film, Funny People, where famous comedian turned actor George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is trying to fall asleep and wants struggling comedian Ira Walsh (Seth Rogen) to talk to him as he dozes off.

George prods him about his life and Ira admits that he changed his last name to Wright from Weiner because people mispronounced it when he was a kid (instead of the way it's supposed to be pronounced--which is WYner, people said WEEner) and he was teased mercilessly because of it. George remarks that it's the pain of enduring this taunting that drove Ira to want to be funny.

George, you see, is experiencing pain of his own. He's dying from a blood disease known as AML and he connects with Ira. He originally hires him to write jokes for his return to stand up but, in reality, he needs a friend--a real one that he can talk to. It seems that George has no genuine friends and has spent too much time being "Hollywood" that he feels disconnected from people. There's a lost love, estranged family and others that have suffered along the way.

George wants to make thing right again with everyone and he changes, revisiting his past, apologizing and reaching out to those he cares about.

At this point, Funny People is a four star movie and, although I detest reading reviews ahead of time so as not to ruin anything, I did glimpse one person calling it Judd Apatow's masterpiece. I had to agree.

Until...

Contrivances in the plot and a long, overly self indulgent set piece from the writer-director resulted in my feeling that I was no longer watching a story, but just another movie. As George reunites with what he feels is the lost love of his life, the film collapses and the believability it has taken great pains to create is stripped away. I no longer saw George Simmons, I saw Adam Sandler. I no longer invested myself in the fantastic tale, I started to distance myself from it. I ceased to see these people as real and saw them instead as stock movie characters.

As I thought about the film on the drive home, Joe Jackson's "Glamour and Pain" randomly shuffled into play on my iPod. And these lyrics reminded me of what I truly enjoyed most about the film...

"No one sees me fly
No one feels my pain
No one hears me cry
No one knows my name
It's glamour and pain
Glamour and pain"

The most interesting aspect of Sandler's George was the fact that he wanted to face dying with dignity and change his life for the better. He was reconnecting with the pain in a different way, still trying to preserve his "glamour" and make people laugh while agonizing on the inside. He wanted to be a better man...a better person...than he had been for a number of years. He wanted to reach out to people so that they could truly know him. The question is...does someone unfamiliar with himself have the capacity to allow others to look under the "glamour" and share the pain?

Had Apatow stuck with that part of the story, it would have made for a better movie overall. However, he veers into a territory that seems all too familiar with little that's special about it. It's still a 3 star film, but it very easily could have been 4 with Oscar nominations (including for Sandler based on the film's first half). At this point, I'll recommend it with reservations. You'll definitely enjoy it, but you may finding yourself checking your watch after an hour and 45 minutes.

Funny People brings the funny as well as the pain, but the pain you'll experience when you see what this film might have been may be too much to bear in the end.