Unsinkable marriage in "Love like an adult"

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Photo: Reuters / Danny Moloshok

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Director Judd Apatow shakes off the fear of turning 40 by delving into a rather dreary childhood

Photo: kinopoisk.ru

Photo: Reuters / Danny Moloshok

Today, Judd Apatow's new comedy "Love Like an Grown-Up" (This Is 40) is being released - the Russian title does not hide any gerontophilia or other extreme things: it is actually a film about the fear of turning 40, which a successful family life helps to overcome. life. However, many, including LIDIA MASLOVA, already knew that at 40 years old life is just beginning.

For 45-year-old Judd Apatow, “Grown-Up Love” is a kind of autobiographical account of a successfully overcome midlife crisis, primarily in terms of family relationships: his lyrical hero (Paul Rudd) in the film has been married to the director’s wife (Leslie Mann) for 15 years ) and raises the director's daughters (Maude and Iris Apatow). The couple, nervous about their 40th birthday, emerged from the Judd Apatow-directed comedy Knocked Up five years ago, in which they were minor characters—Leslie Mann played the married sister of Katherine Heigl's accidentally knocked-up heroine, and Paul Rudd, respectively, the sister’s husband, and now Judd Apatow decided to track their future lives.

In material terms, everything seems to be fine with them: he has a record company, she has a clothing store. The store is notable primarily for the fact that one of the saleswomen (who works part-time as an escort) is played by Megan Fox. Having seen her one day in underwear, the heroine admires her figure and even takes advantage of the kind offer to feel her breasts to make sure they are natural - the owner of the store herself, after the birth of two children, is not particularly inclined to brag about the contents of her bra, although, having once gone with the saleswoman to nightclub, gets the opportunity to raise their sexual self-esteem without compromising marital fidelity. She went down because her husband, it turns out, has been taking Viagra for two years, and among his other shameful secrets is eating unhealthy muffins and the deplorable state of affairs at the record label.

The medical aspect of the frightening 40th birthday is presented in “Grown-Up Love,” perhaps even in more detail than the financial and professional one—once the heroine even catches her husband in an original pose without pants, studying his own hemorrhoids, the symptoms of which he also records on his iPhone and invites his wife to help him with his research. The wife’s rhetorical question: “Perhaps there should be at least some secrets left in our relationship?” remains unanswered - even turning the anus inside out in front of each other cannot destroy this family. "What is a family without hemorrhoids?" - Judd Apatow seems to ask, constantly pitting husband and wife against each other in a showdown that, nevertheless, never turns into a serious disagreement. When the wife reproaches her husband that passion has disappeared between them and now they coexist as brother and sister or as business partners, the husband counters with a musical analogy about Simon and Garfunkel, but the point is not that these cultural jokes are even less effective than physiological jokes , but in the fact that the main performers' stock of their acting wit quickly runs out. A little drama is brought in only by the fathers of the spouses, who are played by representatives of the older, more muscular and seasoned school of acting. His wife's dad (John Lithgow) has distanced himself from her upbringing, and now she vindictively introduces him to his grown-up granddaughters for the first time in many years: "This is my biological father." But Albert Brooks represents a very human, all too human father of the hero, to whom he gave three twin brothers about five years old and constantly begs for money for their maintenance. When his daughter-in-law comes at him, he quickly guesses the reason for her aggression: “You probably just don’t like Jews? But in vain, because your children are Jews too!”

And although Albert Brooks's character does his best to bring a lively note to the rather routine bickering between the main characters, the most emotionally intense scene involving the comic fatty Melissa McCarthy occurs after the final credits of a protracted, more than two-hour film, reminding that all happy families are alike. on a friend. This sometimes causes white envy, sometimes slight boredom, and sometimes brutal frenzy - especially among those people who are not very successful in their personal lives, “a little pregnant”, “a little married”, 40-year-old virgins and other “pranksters” whom Judd Apatow has portrayed before with much more fun and less predictability.

Entertaining fortieth birthday