I’m not sure where Judd Apatow got the idea to do a movie about a middle-aged entertainment industry type living in a gorgeous house in LA who is married to Leslie Mann, obsessed with Graham Parker, working with Lena Dunham and raising Maude and Iris Apatow, but I don’t think he did enough research on his topic. Because no one could be as whiny, spoiled, tasteless, combative and reliant on annoying stand-up comedy riffs as the entire cast of this film, the most disappointing one of the year.
In the opening minutes, Apatow’s self-indulgence quickly slips into self-abuse, and then into audience abuse. Paul Rudd plays Pete, an Apatow-like figure who is turning 40 the same week as his wife, Debbie (Apatow’s missus, Mann — Rudd and her kids are played by Apatow and Mann’s real kids).
Pete and Debbie, who are having sex in the shower, get things going with a dual unfunny riff on his man-parts, just minutes before a minor character delivers a similarly excruciating soliloquy on her numb vagina. Debbie refuses to concede she’s 40, insisting her birthday cake be topped with the numerals “38.” A woman who lies about her age? Hackneyed stuff, even for a stand-up working the Sands in 1971 Las Vegas.
Floundering for a conflict that rises above sitcom level, Apatow finally settles on the impending financial disaster resulting from theft at Debbie’s clothing store and Pete’s failing record label (his big idea is to coax Apatow’s high school favorite Graham Parker to do a new record). It’s a little hard to take the financial jabber seriously as the pair cruise around in their Lexus and BMW, take a trip to a five-star hotel on the Pacific and host a catered party for dozens of people. But Apatow has been rich for a very long time, and he’s forgotten what it means not to be rich (much less broke). Moreover, the characters themselves don’t even seem to take their plight seriously: At the end, they decide to sell their house, which looks like it’s worth seven figures, with as much anguish as if they’re returning a shirt.
Stretching an already-thin story — like most Apatow movies, this one could be called “This Is 140,” as in minutes long — the writer-director invites his pals to drop in and deliver prepackaged sets of mildly humorous observations the comics call “bits.”
Albert Brooks (who is starting to look like Jake LaMotta at the end of “Raging Bull”) plays Pete’s dad, who does gags on his young triplet boys being indistinguishable; Megan Fox plays the hottie at Debbie’s store who inspires horny talk from the men and does a bit on how she isn’t really a hooker; Charlyne Yi plays a store clerk who bizarrely slips into stand-up comedy voice impressions. Oh, and Apatow’s children keep fighting and screaming at each other, which provides a little break from all the scenes in which Mann and Rudd scream and whine.
The comic efforts both feel forced and undercut any attempt at drama: If the characters are feeling chipper enough to make their troubles into Laff Factory routines, we can’t get worked up about them either.
Pete’s business is endangered by his losing touch with contemporary music, but that yields a trite “bit” about aging rockers with a record-label employee (Dunham). A Debbie-Pete fight dissolves into their comparing themselves to Simon and Garfunkel, and after that, with everyone sulking around the breakfast table, one of the daughters wants to know why no one’s talking. “It’s the ‘Sounds of Silence,’ ” says Pete. Get it? It’s what stand-ups call “a callback” to a previous bit. Nonstop delivery of such “material” only works when all your characters are comics, as they were in Apatow’s “Funny People.”
Even the casting doesn’t make sense: Debbie keeps yelling at Pete about his cupcake habit, but Paul Rudd isn’t fat. Meanwhile, the lumpy Jason Segel plays . . . a hot fitness trainer? And Apatow’s patented “outrageous” potty humor is starting to be as funny as a glimpse within grandpa’s open hospital gown. There are scenes, plural, with Rudd on the john, which Apatow seems to find automatically hilarious (it isn’t), and another with Rudd using a mirror to peer, fascinated, up his own butt. That’s as good a metaphor as any for what Apatow is doing.