Funny People (15)

Apatow has built his reputation through making original comedies out of unlikely subjects - male virginity (The 40 Year Old Virgin) and unwanted pregnancy (Knocked Up).   So this one about living in the shadow of death sounds promising.   But though it's set in the world of comedy, it comes over more as a drama about an unlikely friendship between two men.

George (Sandler) is a successful stand up comedian turned film star, who has made his fortune from starring in really bad Hollywood comedies.   We see some examples, so we know how bad they are.   A selfish and self involved man, he's knocked back on his heels by the news that he has an incurable disease and less than a year to live.   Ira (Rogen) is a wannabe stand up comedian, sharing a slobby flat with two buddies, also with show biz ambitions, one of whom, Mark (Jason Shwarzman), is starting to make a breakthrough in a rubbishy teenage television sitcom and rubbing his flatmates' noses in it.   George and Ira meet when George is slumming it at a sort of US version of the Comedy Store and the older man senses a bit of talent in the younger and hires him as his joke writer and personal assistant.   But what both men are really looking for is a friend.  

The unlikely relationship between them works well in an appropriately uncomfortable way.   George, who's been a star for Ira's whole life, has all the power and uses it, but he also needs the younger man to stave off his fear of death and indeed to help him in healing his life in terms of reuniting with his family.   But if you think you can see a tear laden death scene on the horizon with George repenting of his selfish ways and becoming Mr Nice Guy, forget it.   About halfway through the film he learns that the experimental treatment he's been having has worked and he's not going to die after all.   And the film then takes a rather soppy romantic turn with George realising what's important in life and  trying to rekindle his relationship with Laura (Mann), the girl he dumped years earlier,   Only problem is, she's married and it's up to Ira to try to make George see that this is wrong, man.  

As a largely unsentimental drama, this rolls along quite nicely.   Sandler, who is now getting a little too old to play the man child on which he's based a lot of his career, acquits himself well as the unlikeable and lonely hero, though he and Apatow don't have the courage to make him quite unlikeable enough and Rogen is good too as his feed.   But despite the title and the setting, there is a bit of a dearth of comedy here.   For a pair of stand up comedians their comedy routines are dire, with too much use of scatological cock and balls jokes and no real wit.   Much is made of the fact that they are both Jewish, but where are the mordantly funny Jewish jokes about death that the subject calls for?   The sort of humour we might have got say from  Woody Allen or the late Lenny Bruce.   There is though one comic revelation in the last part of the film and that is Eric Bana playing Laura's work obsessed, cuckolded husband, awash in half digested Eastern philosophy and for once using his native Australian accent.   He is both touching and a comic delight.