Forgetting Sarah Marshall - From Six to Midnight

A lot has been said about Jason Segel's penis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but what I want to talk about is Mila Kunis.  Like why is she in crap like American Psycho 2, and Cameron Diaz is still getting work?  I know she can't be hurting after nine years of That '70's Show, and she must be raking in the loot from Family Guy and Robot Chicken, and I can't imagine how much fun that must be, but come on, Mila, get up there on the big screen!

She's got that great exotic look and those big, expressive eyes, and she is instantly charming and sympathetic, and she blows Kristen Bell out of the water, and these are not easy things to do.  There's no way in hell she would be single and working the front desk at an island resort in Hawaii, but I'm willing to forgive the movie its smaller details.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall continues the winning streak of Apatow Productions in putting its characters before its plot, which is right where they should be.  It is the story of Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), a composer for a cheap CSI-like television show, whose girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), breaks up with him, leaving him in a downward spiral of depression and one-night stands.  To pull out of it, he decides to go on vacation to Hawaii, but things take a turn for the worse when he discovers Sarah Marshall is also on vacation there - with her new boyfriend, a sex-addicted recovering drug addict and egotistical rock star named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).

The plot is not the thing here.  The winning elements of Sarah Marshall are its variety of characters and the emotional core of the love triangle between Bretter, Marshall, and the Kunis character.  Jason Segel, who wrote the film, and the director, Nicholas Stoller, cram the movie with great bit parts.  Everyone has a fresh twist on their character, whether it's Jonah Hill as an obsessive waiter with a man-crush on Aldous Snow or Paul Rudd as an eternally stoned surf instructor.  Davon McDonald steals the show as a bartender capable of naming 200 varieties of fish, who can't understand how Segel can be depressed when he's in Hawaii.

There are a lot of small laughs and a lot of big laughs here, and a lot of heart.  The funniest scene in the film takes place at a bar where Kunis has arranged for Bretter to perform a musical number from an opera he is writing.  The opera is a variation on Dracula with muppets.  The song that Segel sings contains the lyrics, "Blood will run down your face when you are decapitated."  Now, I don't know exactly why I find that line so funny - maybe because blood wouldn't run down the face of a decapitated head - but it had me rolling in the aisles.  But the point of the song, and of Bretter's inspiration for writing an opera of Dracula, is that Dracula just wanted to be loved, and kept having that love taken away from him.  

You see, any other comedy wouldn't consider things like this; wouldn't be primarily concerned with how its characters are feeling.  Most comedies are concerned, in fact, with how their characters are hurting.  Apatow and his gifted collaborators are not concerned with kicking people in the balls and farting, and I'm not saying ball-kicking and farting are not funny, it's just that they are cheap and easy gags for cheap and easy filmmakers.  And, largely, they are not funny.  

Heart is a difficult thing to have in a comedy.  It becomes easily maudlin or just plain sappy.  I think what Apatow has done, and what Segel does here, is they don't stereotype their characters, they make them flesh and blood.  They work them from the inside out.  And they don't stop there.  Kristen Bell's Sarah Marshall character could very easily have become a bitch that you hated and rooted against, but Segel has sympathy for her, and there are actually some pleasant and provoking developments with her that caught me off guard.

It's surprising when a comedy comes along these days and has sex jokes and toilet humor and male genitalia in it and is actually funny.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall fills those pants.