A lot has been said about the last five year or so’s rash of Judd Apatow produced comedies and what people do or do not like about them. Without ever seeing any promotion for the film you know you’re going to get a developmentally stunted man-child as your main character. They are going to have some sort of romantic entanglement with a girl that would be way too attractive for them in real life, some job issues, some bonding with other slackers, and by the end they’re going to learn to grow up and get their adult lives together. Some people have issues with the inherent raunch that’s going to be involved in the comedy, while some people find their sex-gags hilarious. Personally I fall down on the side of being a supporter. The Apatow umbrella comedies are all good to varying degrees, largely dependant on who’s actually doing the writing and the directing, but you can always rest assured that they’re going to be wittier than most of the other stuff out there, they’re not going to rely so much on gross-out humor, and they’re going to at least shoot for having a heart, developing their characters, and telling a story about people. Get Him to the Greek revisits the character of Aldous Snow (Russel Brand) that was first introduced in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This film and Sarah Marshall both share the same director, Nicholas Stoller, but what sets them apart is that Stoller wrote this one himself, and for Sarah Marshall he was working off of a script written by Jason Segel. I loved that script by Jason Segel, and my biggest question going into this sort-of sequel was whether or not the writing change was going to show.
The advertisements for Forgetting Sarah Marshall looked great to me, but the one thing that I wasn’t sure about going into that film was the Aldous Snow character. He looked a little too wacky, a little too one note, and it seemed like I might get tired of him by the end of the film. The biggest surprise that came from that film, then, was how hilarious Brand was as the character, how subtly he injected humor into his portrayal of a pretty out there rock star, and how he was probably my favorite part of the whole film. Here, in Get Him to the Greek, Snow takes center stage. Despite my love of the character in that first film, I was still kind of reticent about him taking on so much of a larger role. Could he transition smoothly from being such a tasty accent flavor to trying to anchor an entire film as the main dish? Ultimately, the results were kind of mixed for me, but definitely leaning toward positive. This isn’t quite like trying to give Kramer his own spin-off sitcom. Snow is more humanized here, they attempt to give him a real journey, and their efforts make the story at least palatable, even if it’s not a complete success.
The advertisements for Forgetting Sarah Marshall looked great to me, but the one thing that I wasn’t sure about going into that film was the Aldous Snow character. He looked a little too wacky, a little too one note, and it seemed like I might get tired of him by the end of the film. The biggest surprise that came from that film, then, was how hilarious Brand was as the character, how subtly he injected humor into his portrayal of a pretty out there rock star, and how he was probably my favorite part of the whole film. Here, in Get Him to the Greek, Snow takes center stage. Despite my love of the character in that first film, I was still kind of reticent about him taking on so much of a larger role. Could he transition smoothly from being such a tasty accent flavor to trying to anchor an entire film as the main dish? Ultimately, the results were kind of mixed for me, but definitely leaning toward positive. This isn’t quite like trying to give Kramer his own spin-off sitcom. Snow is more humanized here, they attempt to give him a real journey, and their efforts make the story at least palatable, even if it’s not a complete success.
Where Snow was obnoxiously sober during Sarah Marshall, Get Him Greek details his slip back into addiction and vice. Jonah Hill plays Aaron Green, a young up and comer at a struggling record company tasked with getting Snow from England to a highly publicized concert at the Greek Theater on time and without any disasters. Snow’s manic, rock star behavior and severe addictions make the task a challenge, and Green’s sheepish, fish out of water reactions to the proceedings furnish the film with a lot of it’s comedy. And the comedy is what really works here, and what keeps the film from descending into mediocrity. The gags all work, flat out. All of the drug humor, all of the self involved yelling from P Diddy, and all of the pompous, pretentious posturing from Snow’s male-diva go a long way. I was belly laughing all the way through. Special attention has to be given to the different ‘Infant Sorrow’ songs that make up a large part of the film’s soundtrack. They were all impressively written. While many parody songs can go too far into the ridiculous, these are just awful enough to make you laugh, but just subtle enough to convince you that they might really exist in our current creatively bankrupt popular music climate. I imagine that writing and recording them was an intensive, lengthy process, and it’s one that might go virtually unnoticed by a lot of viewers. That sort of attention to detail, just because, earns a lot of brownie points with me.
What fell a little short for me was the character stuff that usually sets these films with the Apatow label apart. Green is having issues with his nurse fiancé Daphne (Elizabeth Moss). She wants him to move to Seattle so that she can transfer to a better job in a different hospital. Offended that she finds her profession to be more of a priority than his, he lashes out and flirts with promiscuity and dabbles in being a good-time Charlie while out on the road with Snow. It’s his place to learn the importance of the relationships in our lives, and how you must learn to compromise to keep them healthy. Snow is broken, sad, and lonely. He has split with the mother of his child, his career is on a severe downturn; he has no friends, no confidants, and despite his very public persona leads a very lonely private life. It’s his job to set his ego aside, learn to let people in, and make real connections rather than rely merely on superficial trysts. That’s all fine and good, but the struggles of the characters take second stage here. The emotional crisis that they experience come late in the film and feel a bit tacked on. Whereas Sarah Marshall focused almost entirely on Jason Segel’s characters’ foibles and his attempts at overcoming them, Get Him to the Greek is much more of a road film. It’s about scenery and happenings first and character second. An attempt is made, the acting is there, but you can tell that character just wasn’t as much of a priority in this sequel.
Jonah Hill really impressed me in the recently released Duplass brother’s film Cyrus. In my review of that film I hoped that he would get further chances to explore his dramatic chops. Get Him to the Greek gives him a bit of a chance at that. In his scenes with Moss I bought him as a guy in a relationship, in his scenes with his demanding boss P Diddy I bought him as the hungry young music fan. A lot of people were ready to write Hill off as little more than motor-mouthed comedy sidekick fodder after his star-making turn in Superbad, and this role, while a little underwritten, will probably help a lot of people get past that. I would have liked for more of the emphasis to be put on him as a character, and a little less to be put on him as a straight man foil for Brand, but he does well with what he’s given. Brand is a pretty big question mark to me, as I’ve never seen him play a character other than Aldous Snow. Certainly he has this particular shtick down, but is he capable of doing anything else? I would venture to guess yes, I just don’t know where the role is going to come from to give him the chance. Brand is a bit frightening in a scene where he is presented with the possibility of not getting his next heroin fix. He is affecting in the scenes where his loneliness is eating him up. The potential for something more is there, I just don’t know if people will care if he isn’t all longhaired and crazy in his delivery. Hopefully he’ll find that breakthrough role. Elizabeth Moss is similarly good as the Hill character’s girlfriend. She wasn’t given much to do other than act tired from being overworked, and appear frustrated when Hill behaves badly; but she took a role that could have looked like a faceless shrew if played by a lesser actress and injected enough humanity into her to keep us caring. Towards the end, when a threesome between her and the male leads is proposed, she’s even given an opportunity to revel in some humor of her own and comes off as very capable. Overall, the acting was very good, so good in fact that I was always wishing that the principle players had something a bit more substantial to sink their teeth into.
