This is 40: Judd Apatow's Home Movie Magnum Opus

Paul Rudd ... Pete

Leslie Man ... Debbie

Albert Brooks ... Larry

John Lithgow ... Oliver

Written and directed by Judd Apatow

 

Review by Dan Geddes

This is 40 is a moderately entertaining Judd Apatow comedy about a married couple facing the difficulties of life as they face their fortieth birthdays.
Peter (Rudd) is a Viagra-taking, cupcake gobbling, indepedent music producer married to Debbie (Mann), a beautiful, funny woman who runs a clothing boutique. While appearances suggest they have everything a contemporary American couple could want (good looks, a beautiful house, two daughters, and an affluent Southern California lifestyle) problems lurk beneath. These characters appeared in Apatow's hit movie Knocked Up, making This is 40 a "spin-off sequel."
Peter has been taking Viagra, a revelation which horrifies Debbie, who doesn't want to admit that they're aging. Debbie lies to doctors about her age and is worried that she's losing her looks.
They also have financial issues. Peter's independent music label is not really making any money. Debbie's boutique is missing $12,000. Peter's sixty year old father (Brooks) has been sponging off Peter. The Brooks character is too lazy to look for work or take care of the three young sons he inexplicably fathered after his wife took fertility treatments.
It's hard to take Peter and Debbie's problems too seriously; we're not that worried about them. They don't really seem too concerned about cutting back on their spending. To break out of their funk, they go on an overnight stay in a beautiful hotel, where they eat a lot of marijuana-laced cookies, order every piece of cake on the room service menu, and smear it on each other while a room service waiter looks at them like they're weirdo's.
Debbie suspects that her sexy boutique employee (Megan Fox) has stolen $12,000 from her. But she's not that angry or that concerned about it. She calmly goes on a night out with her, where they dance to hip-hop music and flirt with team members from the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team.
Peter has a super cool job as the head of his own independent record label, where he produces the swan-song albums of rock artists who enjoyed a limited cache in the 1970s (Graham Parker). Earlier he spent $30,000 for an indoor neon sign with the name of his company. He spends $12,000 to fly in Parker's band for a reunion concert that few attend.
Peter somehow has managed to lend $80,000 to his layabout father (Albert Brooks) without Debbie finding out. Peter pays an accountant to manage his finances, but still he's missed a mortgage payment. Debbie pays for a personal trainer.
So it's difficult to sympathize with the financial problems of characters who have no concept of frugality and seem to take all the amenities of a vain, affluent Southern California American lifestyle as their birthright.
Their financial problems are an artificial distraction anyway. Peter and Debbie are clearly modelled after Apatow himself and his real-life wife, Leslie Mann, who essentially plays herself. To give his stand-in character more problems, Apatow makes Peter into a struggling music producer instead of a successful Hollywood writer-director-producer; this is wise; as it would be even harder to sympathize with these characters if they were financially secure, in addition to all their other good fortune. Stories require conflicts, so their financial problems feel manufactured to create the impression that Peter and Debbie have problems in all aspects of their lives (financial, sexual, parenting, their relations with their own parents, their friends, etc.).

Read the rest of the review at http://www.thesatirist.com/films/This_Is_40.html