Breaking up is hard to do, as an old song once cautioned us, but that’s hardly a newsflash for anyone who has endured the agony of being dumped. Untold millions of books, movies and songs have commemorated the hell of being kicked to the proverbial curb and the subsequent tears, depression, drinking, vomiting, rebound, stalking and victim’s protective order … or have I said too much?
With that much heartache, it’s clear that breakups have great potential for first-rate comedy. At least that was the thinking of Jason Segel, and the world is a better place for it. As the screenwriter and star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he finds comic gold inside the misery of romantic rejection.
He also mines plenty of raunchy fun. In keeping with such Judd Apatow productions as Superbad, Knocked Up and The 40-Year-OId Virgin, Segel and director Nicholas Stoller fashion a hard-R comedy whose gauntlet is thrown — or whipped out, as the case might be — in the opening minutes, when Segel figuratively and literally gives new meaning to “naked vulnerability.”
As Peter Bretter, Segel plays a sad-sack composer who scores the musical cues for a cliché-riddled TV cops series. He is a confirmed couch potato, the kind of schlubby guy who wears the same sweatpants for a week and slurps his cereal from big mixing bowls, but he also has the shockingly good fortune of being the longtime boyfriend of Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), the TV series’ beautiful and famous leading lady.
Alas, Sarah breaks up with Peter in one of cinema’s all-time, cringe-inducing breakup scenes. Peter eventually tries to rebound through a series of very funny one-night-stands; “I need to B my L on somebody’s Ts,” he discreetly explains to his stepbrother (Bill Hader). But casual sex doesn’t reduce Peter’s crying jags – not even when he’s in the middle of “things” – and so he jets off to clear his head in Hawaii.
But Peter, who checks into a resort that Sarah had once talked about, quickly discovers that his ex is a guest at the same hotel. And she is not alone. Sarah is with her new squeeze, mega-libidinous British rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). Peter suffers through a host of painful, and painfully uproarious, situations, determined not to be run off. It helps, of course, that he is befriended by Rachel, an amiable hotel hostess played by stunning Mila Kunis.
The picture’s delirious blend of smutty humor and genuine warmth is familiar to anyone who knows the Apatow blueprint. By all rights, the hybrid shouldn’t work as well as it does, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall balances the factions. First-time director Stoller, who was a writer on Apatow’s short-lived Undeclared TV series, provides an agreeably breezy, laidback pace. As for the script, Segel’s comic sensibility might be driven by his penis, but the characters he creates are all heart.
The filmmakers benefit from a wonderful ensemble cast. Segel makes for an endearingly sensitive man-child, while Kunis commands the movie every time she’s on screen. As the cocky rocker, Brand is all charisma and impeccable timing. Bell, despite being the titular character, is the weakest of the leads, but she does manage to flesh out what easily could have been a one-note role. Rounding out the cast are dependable Apatow regulars Paul Rudd as a zonked-out surfing instructor, Jack McBrayer as a sexually naïve honeymooner and a miscast Jonah Hill as a sexually ambiguous celebrity stalker.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 