This Is 40
Three stars (out of four)
Rated: 14A
Midway between your first kiss and your first pension cheque, age 40 marks life’s grand divide for most people.
You can no longer pretend you’re a kid, but you flinch at being addressed as “Sir” or “Madam.” You still enjoy going out, but staying home with the family, the TV and a pizza is less trouble.
In short, it’s an unsettled time of life, a feeling This Is 40 nails in all its untidy comic sprawl.
Cannily aimed both at Generation Xers now reaching the Big 4-0 and baby boomers who remember this traumatic milestone (the soundtrack goes from grunge to classic rock), it’s the most seasoned picture of the four written and directed by comedy kingpin Judd Apatow.
It’s also the most personal: Apatow just turned 45, while his wife Leslie Mann, who co-stars in the film with Paul Rudd, reached 40 earlier this year. Mann’s character Debbie and Rudd’s character Pete were the fractious married couple in a subplot of Knocked Up, Apatow’s pregnancy comedy of five years ago. They now move to centre stage for what Apatow calls a “sort of” sequel to his earlier film.
Debbie and Pete squabble merrily away as if Knocked Up never ended. After some 14 years of marriage, Debbie and Pete are still hanging in there through the good, the bad and the ugly (the latter include hemorrhoids and rectal exams). But as they both turn 40 in the same eventful week, the sex/money/love/attention issues that test all marriages loom larger than ever.
A sexy opening scene in a shower suddenly turns from hot to hurtful when Pete makes a surprise revelation. Pete will later complain to a pal, “We’re in one of those phases where everything that the other person says annoys the s--t out of each other.”
He and Debbie both run their own companies — he has an indie record company, she has a clothing store — but both firms are hemorrhaging cash.
Their daughters Sadie and Charlotte (Maude and Iris Apatow, the director and Mann’s real-life children) are, at the respective ages of 13 and eight, changing from being precocious into a real handful.
They all live in an implausibly nice house, even by Hollywood movie standards. Both drive fancy cars and the family has enough iMacs, iPods, iPhones and other gizmos to stock a small Apple store.
Yet they’re in danger of losing it all because of chronic overspending and money mismanagement, made worse by Pete’s insistence on lending thousands of dollars at a time to his sponge of a dad (Albert Brooks, funny man).
Debbie has the opposite problem with her wealthy father (John Lithgow, straight man). He has all the cash he needs, but he’s so aloof and distant, he can’t even remember the names of his granddaughters.
The movie frequently shifts from comic to dramatic and back again, true to Apatow’s whiplash style but also true to life. An acknowledged admirer of James L. Brooks and the late Robert Altman, Apatow shares their penchant for extraneous subplots and unnecessary characters, but the diversions are frequently worth our time — even if the film’s total running time of 134 minutes is a tad indulgent.
Pete’s reckless love of music leads him to sign and promote the reunion of aging New Wave cult rockers Graham Parker and the Rumour, which provides both nostalgia and satiric bite as fandom proves fickle. Parker enjoys sending himself and the music biz up, aided by such Apatow troupers as Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids) and Lena Dunham (TV’s Girls).
Debbie’s fear of aging (and bankruptcy) sends her on a wild night out in the company of her saucy and suspect store employee, played by Megan Fox with a hitherto unseen sense of comic timing that goes a long way toward easing her post-Transformers doldrums.
This Is 40 equitably looks at middle age from both sides of the gender divide, but whereas Rudd is reliably good, Mann is really good, even when all those subplots and second characters start to wear.
Watch the quicksilver reactions on her face when she gets unexpected news both happy and daunting. It’s one of many moments when Mann makes This Is 40 more than just another laugher about going middle-aged crazy.
Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.