It was the moment Adam Sandler stuck his hand down his pants that did me in.
Well into the stupefying I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Sandler stands in the bedroom of a woman he's in love with but can't have - Jessica Biel, playing his attorney - and watches in agony as she strips down to a teensy bra and panties. He can't jump her, because she thinks he's gay. He's not; he's a strapping fireman. But he's pretending to be gay to secure benefits for the children of his best friend, a widower, and she, while handling their case, has become his pal. A pal comfortable enough to insist he feel her breasts to prove they're real.
I've never been a fan of Sandler's movies - I've always found them an odd blend of infantile humour and frightening rage. But he's capable of physical comedy, and at first, the agony in his eyes as Biel proffers her luscious but off-limits body is funny. The fact that he quickly has to tie his sweatshirt around his waist is funny. Yet Sandler can't stop there - that wouldn't be literal enough.
He has to jam his hand down his pants and fish around in there, fidgeting and readjusting so assiduously that he stops looking like a man wrestling with an erection, and starts looking like a toddler who has to go pee-pee.
Kevin James and Adam Sandler in I Now Pronouce You Chuck and Larry: Are females so alarming that men prefer to stay adolescent forever?
The little boys of summer are out in force. Before Chuck and Larry, of course, there was Knocked Up, perhaps the seminal movie - in both senses of the word - of the current generation of romantic comedies that pair aged boy doofuses with women who are far more mature and responsible. Knocked Up's hero, played by Seth Rogan, is a bong-sucking, porn-addled, baby-fatted slacker living off the last few cents of the insurance money he received in a car accident.
The film's heroine, played by Katherine Heigl, is a sleek, golden goddess with a burgeoning job hosting a television show. During a sozzled one-night stand, he gets her pregnant, and she spends the whole movie alternately waiting for and nagging at him to grow up. It's not that he can't -- he just doesn't wanna. He and his stoner buds are the kind of guys who know 5,000 words for "penis," but can't bring themselves to utter the word "abortion."
The Knocked Up gang has lots of company in their perpetual playpen. In The Break-Up, Wedding Crashers, Failure to Launch, About a Boy and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, man-boys with after-school-calibre jobs - played by, respectively, Vince Vaughn (the first two films), Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant and Steve Carell -- are hauled into adulthood by women mature and well-employed: Jennifer Aniston as an art dealer, Rachel McAdams as the brainy daughter of a U.S. treasury secretary, Sarah Jessica Parker as a family "interventionist," Rachel Weisz as a single mom. (The tagline for About a Boy is, literally, "Growing up has nothing to do with age."). Related films include Hot Rod, Old School, Fever Pitch, Big Daddy, Shallow Hal and School of Rock.
In them, the man-boys take smelly poos, vomit, play video games, surf Internet porn, guzzle beers, watch countless hours of TV, and masturbate. A lot. They are more childlike - more id-driven - than actual children. Yet they also manage to get those sublime women to have sex with them, and even to fall in love with them. Unlike previous generations of romantic comedies - which are beautifully explicated in David Denby's essay, A Fine Romance, in the July 23 issue of The New Yorker - in this generation, sex comes way before love.
Now, I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh during some of these films, especially Knocked Up. The interplay between the male friends - which is the true emotional relationship in these films - is hilarious. The relationships the men have with women, however, depressed me. Is this really all that a postfeminist woman can expect from love: to bully a recalcitrant man-child into the house she pays for with her steady job, and pin him there long enough to have actual children with him?
I feel like I'm watching the de-evolution of our species into praying mantises, where the next step can only be that the females bite off the males' tiny heads when they're through with them.
In the Aug. 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Rogan and his Knocked Up director, Judd Apatow, defend their place in the comedic pantheon, comparing themselves to Jack Klugman, Phil Silvers, Woody Allen, Albert Books, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. But I grew up with those guys, too, and while I agree that men in romantic comedies don't need to be conventionally handsome to win a woman's heart, those comedians weren't petrified of being adults. Nor were the comedic leading men: Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, even Woody Allen, neurotic as he was. Can you imagine any of them readjusting their penises to get a laugh?
The greatest romantic comedies, Denby asserts -- from It Happened One Night to Manhattan - rely on banter between the sexes that is "aggressive but not coarse, angry but not rancorous, silly but not shamed, melancholy but not ravaged."
Today's, of course, are the opposite. And in previous generations, the men don't run away from the women - they cavort, stumble, falter, but eventually they run toward them. Are today's women so alarming that men prefer to stay adolescent forever?
It's especially poignant that Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, two giants of film directing who devoted their careers to exploring the emotional lives of adults, both died on July 30, at the peak of man-boy mania. They didn't make light romantic comedies, obviously, but they made movies for and about the full-grown, and as a young filmgoer I was fascinated, jealous, eager to grow up and enter their world.
Despite its mysteries and complications, those directors made becoming an adult look like something to aspire to rather than avoid. These boys today just look terrified to me. Why have adult moviegoers ceded all the screens to their stories - especially when it's the same story, told over and over, ever more crassly?
Apatow (as producer) and Rogan (as writer and co-star) are back with a new film this week, Superbad. It, too, is about wisecracking buddies who make motions toward chasing girls, but really prefer hanging out with each other. It, too, is full of bodily humour and foul language. It, too, is funny as hell. The final scene, in which the friends separate to go off with females, even moved me.
But unlike the films above, it didn't depress me. Because the heroes aren't man-boys, they're actual boys - 18-year-olds about to separate for college. Their anxieties about women and adulthood are legitimate. And age-appropriate.
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