In 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' boys do cry

By Michael Sragow Sun Movie Critic

April 18, 2008

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(B) Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a male rescue fantasy played for drop-your-pants farce. The love of a good woman saves a romantic sad sack - and redefines the male weepie as comedy.

In the old-style male weepie, men in the audience fight back tears as their heroic counterpart on screen maintains composure while losing a lover or comrade. He cries at the peak of heartbreak, and it's cathartic, even for him.

In the new male weepie, the antihero bawls hysterically, in floods, like Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give - and the men in the audience roar with appreciation, because it breaks the taboo that straight men can't be drama queens.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks snap, tension and bravura. The audience busts a gut when the writer-star, Jason Segel, and his director, Nicholas Stoller, break the taboo of full-frontal male nudity, but the complete package verges on gimmickry.

Yet the movie is novel and big-hearted. It often succeeds at substituting a smorgasbord of psychological confusions for comic architecture. Segel and Stoller, the latest team to emerge from Judd Apatow's gang, try to intuit their way to comedic truth in the manner of their master.

They don't have as keen a truth-detector - or a comedy-detector - as the Apatow of Knocked Up. Their movie is less like a party than a long night at a friendly saloon. Still, it's replete with wayward charms.

Segel plays Peter Bretter, a composer for a forensic cop TV show called Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime, whose star, Sarah Marshall ( Kristen Bell), dumps him at the start. Deciding the only way to get over her is to get away from Los Angeles, Peter heads for a Hawaiian resort that Sarah has always talked about - and naturally, finds Sarah there with a semi-fatuous, semi-brilliant British rock singer, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).

Segel is a big, lumbering fellow who makes Peter a fleshy monument to self-pity. He's a pitiable blob juxtaposed against Bell's beautifully toned blond Sarah. His plight touches super-competent customer-service specialist Rachel Jansen (Mila Kunis), who sneaks him into a suite that goes unoccupied unless Oprah-scale stars have booked it.

No man has ever been luckier on the rebound than Peter: Rachel is kind, gorgeous and savvy. Thanks to Kunis, who should become a Cameron Diaz-level star, her eyes give off the gleam of sympathetic intelligence. Sex may start in the brain, but Kunis proves that when a performer can show it beginning there and emanating everywhere else, she acquires an inexhaustible radiance.

Segel manages to be funniest in the first half-hour, when he's no more than a dish rag, or maybe a mountain of dish rags; he veers between obtuseness and a knowing masochism. He realizes, for example, that if he puts his clothes on as Sarah breaks up with him, the conversation will stop and everything between them will be over. When he makes a foray into dating, he's ridiculously transparent about his need to sleep with somebody, anybody. Yet his aching clumsiness works for him in a comic-pathetic way. He gets an attractive girl into bed, then bores, bemuses or maybe just befuddles her.

Segel's Peter is an ace shedder of tears, but a slug at euphoria or joy. In Hawaii, Kunis' Rachel picks up the slack. Beyond Rachel's blend of shrewdness and gaiety, she sees the hidden humor in Peter - including the wit buried in his puppet-theater operetta version of Dracula (his creative dream). The connection between the composer and the hotel clerk gains a semblance of plausibility because in some ways she's as loony as he is, especially when it comes to romantic risk and hurt.

Although the movie turns into one humiliation after another, Segel and Stoller share the Apatow gang's abundance of spirit. Everyone is nutty yet everyone has a purpose and even a smattering of wit. A hotel waiter named Matthew (Apatow veteran Jonah Hill), who has a man-crush (perhaps a boy-crush) on Sarah's new beau Aldous, hands the rock star a demo. Later, Aldous admits, "I was going to listen to that, but then I just carried on living my life."

Yet Aldous proves his mettle acting like a sexual coach for a confused newlywed played by 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer, a whiz at wholesome befuddlement. Sarah herself, we learn, had the sense to see that while writing tension music for Crime Scene, Peter was falling into a sort of well-paid Hollywood slackerdom.

Sarah gave it the old college try - though maybe it was just the old acting-class try, because sometimes, the characters' positive riffs spring out of nowhere, and Bell, for all her gumption and perkiness, can't keep Sarah from paling in every sense before the dark, hot-blooded Rachel.

But Forgetting Sarah Marshall carries a keen sense of the way superficial guys or gals like Sarah can serve a purpose, even with packaged bonhomie. And when Peter makes a wrong move, the audience bellows its disapproval - proof that even when Forgetting Sarah Marshall loses its mind, its heart is in the right place.

>>>Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Universal Pictures) Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand. Directed by Nicholas Stoller. Rated R for sexual content, language and some graphic nudity. Time 110 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com