In 'Knocked Up,' family values get a twist
"The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and his new "Knocked Up" make writer-director Judd Apatow today's preeminent creator of low-concept sex comedies. The sex is unsafe, the drug use is rambunctious, and the lewd jokes are delivered with cheer. Yet what happens to his life-size characters could happen to us -- if not, perhaps, adult virginity, then at least holding out for real love. Certain family values remain magically sacrosanct.
In "Knocked Up," the premise is easily digestible. A budding TV personality becomes pregnant after she beds a doofus and inveterate pothead she meets in a Los Angeles nightclub. They're both in their 20s. She's a beauty named Alison (Katherine Heigl ). He's a stocky Canadian slob named Ben (Seth Rogen ). Ostensibly, all they have in common is horniness.
The days before their meeting, the meeting itself, and the sex happen in a very funny collection of scenes. And quickly we learn that Alison's story will be as well - rounded as Ben's. She lives in a cottage behind the rustic suburban house where her older sister (Leslie Mann ) lives with her husband (Paul Rudd ) and their two daughters. Alison has just been promoted to an on-air interviewer position at E! and is wary of divulging the news of her pregnancy to her vapid co-workers.
The first half-hour sets the bar pretty high. But the rest of "Knocked Up" is equally sharp, mostly because it turns a convention on its head. Daringly, the movie upends the joke of Ben's fatherhood by showing him falling in love -- not simply with Alison, but with the idea of a family. His wish to be more than some baby-daddy isn't just funny; it's tender and quite lovely.
That's not to say that Apatow stints on the laughs. Thanks to Ben's grubby coterie of friends, outrageousness is built around the movie's bracingly wholesome -- OK, unfashionably conservative -- center. Ben lives in the San Fernando Valley in a filthy house with roommates -- Jonah Hill , Jay Baruchel , Jason Segel , and Martin Starr -- who are galactic stoners, too. The opening sequence gives you the gist: They suck on bongs, dance by their pool, and hit the amusement park, all while Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" growls on the soundtrack. They're starting a Web business devoted to locating celebrity nude scenes in movies. Basically, the sloth is so thick we could choke on it.
Ben is obnoxious, but in an adolescent way. He doesn't seem like a 23-year-old going on 14. He actually seems 14. Rogen , who had a smaller part as one of Steve Carell's buddies in "Virgin," is something rare in comedy: a guy whose boorishness has charm. The packaging helps. He may talk like a sailor but he's built like the cuddliest of plumbers. He makes it easy to accept that a woman would agree to raise a child with this man even if that woman isn't necessarily you.
Still, it's not entirely clear why Alison proceeds to build a relationship with the jobless, moneyless Ben. For one thing, she never witnesses the beautiful conversation between Ben and his dad (Harold Ramis ) about paternity. Still, the couple looks for a gynecologist together. He agrees to watch "Breathless " with her while his buddies play paintball . To help with his "work," she willingly warns him that he's about to miss the big make-out scene between Denise Richards and Neve Campbell in "Wild Things ." It hardly seems like a fair exchange.
Her tolerance is actually astounding. Throughout the film, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop and for her to pick it up and throw it at him. Heigl is believable and sympathetic. She plays one of the doctors on "Grey's Anatomy," and she's at her best here when she's going through Alison's hormonal tantrums and hurt feelings.
Alison, though, has nothing on her sister, Debbie. The brittle marriage between Debbie and her husband Pete becomes a possible preview of what she and Ben can anticipate if they make it: thinly veiled acrimony. Debbie is the film's strangest character. She's volatile and emasculating (in a moment that's funny for its unrelenting meanness, she accuses Pete of not being concerned about the alarming number of pedophiles in their neighborhood), but she's needy and worried about Pete's suspicious disappearances.
Debbie gets away with being such a cauldron of extremes because the airy-voiced Mann is extremely good at playing them. She happens to be Apatow's wife (the kids in the movie are theirs), and with the possible exception of Téa Leoni , it's hard to imagine who else could get away with this combination of needling and affection. Rudd is her comedic equal, if not her emotional one. He's been playing variations of the unhappy husband for a while, but he finds characteristically silly ways of expressing it: Here he deadpans while Mann goes ballistic. It's a strategy that's worked for many a sitcom husband.
Apatow has actually spent most of his career in television, creating such superior programs as "Freaks and Geeks " and "Undeclared ," two series that wed the raucously antic with great humanity (they were promptly canceled). His sensibility is suited for the small screen. But his comedy philosophy works even better concentrated in a single movie: Funny and human needn't be mutually exclusive.
In "Knocked Up," after Pete and Ben have fights with their women, they go to Vegas, do some mushrooms, trip out at Cirque du Soleil , then, still high, search their souls back at their hotel room. If Paul Mazursky had ever written a scene for Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble , it would go like this.
At some point during this unburdening, Pete makes the wounded observation that "marriage is like 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' except that it's not funny ." Apatow invests all his scenes with that kind of piquant feeling. In both of his movies, there's a lot of truth in the characters' neediness, their joy, and the struggle to hold onto their standards. Life may be like a sitcom, but the comedy generously springs from the situation of being alive.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog. 
