Funny People

The riskiness in being a film about comedians and funny people in general is that you had better bring the humor, lots of it, but you also need to unearth some humanity at the heart of the humor.  The film's setup starts with a successful comedic film star, George Simmons (Adam Sandler), finding out he's got a disease that threatens to shorten his life considerably, goes back to doing stand-up comedy just to break up the darkness of his predicament, and he somewhat befriends Ira (Seth Rogen), who works at a deli shop and does free stand-up comedy, trying to get that big break. George hires Ira to write jokes for him.  This unlikely friendship provides the framework and bromance angle for the film as George tries to keep his condition underwraps, while making use of his time, with Ira's help.  George sees things through a veil of regret and reaches out to his old girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann), who got married, bore 2 daughters, and they re-connect, and George sees what he missed out on by taking the easy road of stardom and celebrity bachelorhood.  It's the last act that just feels clunky and uninvolving for me.

Clocking in at almost 145 minutes, it's a long film for a "comedy" or even a "dramedy".  The last third of the film sags quite a bit, I think another 10-15 minutes could have been excised, and trimmed some fat that stalls the film's momentum as it reaches its conclusion.  Adam Sandler does some decent acting in the first half of the film, but the film just sort of gets away from him in the second half.  Seth Rogen's Ira should have been written a little funnier, but he gets in his share of laughs and quiet comedic bits.  The rest of the ensemble is fine (Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill, Eric Bana, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza), but their subplots didn't really add much to the film, except to sprinkle in some comedy scenes to buoy the film's running time.

This film was a little more cinema-like than I was expecting with a Judd Apatow production.  Starting with Janusz Kaminski as the DP, the look of the film simply looked less like a sitcom filmed on video (or a conventional 3-camera TV shoot), and more like an honest-to-goodness film.  So that was appreciated, even though it does introduce some film grain, and lens flares at times, but overall, more effective in setting the tone.

I give it 2.75 stars, or a grade of B-.