Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Almost marred by a trite plot and a few uncomfortably long and unfunny gimmicks, the movie nevertheless works in the usual Apetow way: oddball realism on amphetamines. Stretches of script do huddle in the dark places, where we strain our eyes and ears trying to comprehend this very average emptiness, but then Russell Brand complains that his salad was "mundane," or Jason Segel spites both the earth and a bitchy, horny yoga teacher by doing a headstand, and then, and I can't possibly explain how funny it is without having you hear it, exclaiming, "Yeah! I'm doing a fucking headstand!" This flick is so unexpectedly funny--hysterically funny--at unexpected times, just when the narrative ordinariness lulls us back to being smug asshole pretend critics, that its complete and total success owes as much to its beautifully sincere syncopation--wild funny, humdrum, humdrum, wha?!--a snaky authenticity that widens and deepens the script, exposing weird cavernous pockets just out of reach and just beyond the film's interest, but definitely proud and powerful and crumbling--as it owes to its combustible rockethumor. Because he blissfully dedicates his talent to the most banal content available--and this is why his art is so democratically vulgar--Apatow deceives us into thinking that he anchors himself to anything and everything punk or puerile. What too much of his own audience neglects, though, and what every one of his decriers misunderstands, is that his profoundly unrhythmic experiments are average in their pursuit of the common, idiotic, completely unexceptional American experience. But that funny little swing in his films, that rhythmic swagger, and the bursting, blinding genius of his random little comedic quanta elevate the average beyond cliche, which is what it is when represented, and restore it to sublime, just under the limit, touchable but indescribable, which is what the average is in us, as we live it, when the most mundane emotion or epiphany--or a salad or a fucking headstand--dawns over us, whitens us, blooming inside of us new and whimsical and more than a little poignant and ephemeral. He makes the average personal, and that is no common achievement.