Forgetting Sarah Marshall

[April 16th, 2008]

There’s a very sweet moment early in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up that exemplifies the vulnerability that has distinguished his comedies. Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl are cuddled together on a bed, soon after she’s learned she’s carrying his child. “You’re a sweet guy, right?” she asks timidly. “Don’t fuck me over.” Ben is astonished: “I’m the guy that girls fuck over. So don’t you fuck me over.” Sounds like a promise to me. But fast-forward a year to Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Jason Segal, one of Apatow’s stock players since the greenness of Freaks and Geeks, wrote the screenplay and plays Peter, who flees to Hawaii after a painful breakup, only to encounter his ex-girlfriend (Kristen Bell) and her new man (Russell Brand) at the same beach resort. He’s getting video-chat advice from his stepbrother Brian (Bill Hader) when he spots Brian’s wife listening in. “I’d like to have a woman’s perspective on this,” Peter says. “Really?” she asks eagerly. “No.”

Looks like everybody who’s been waiting for Apatow’s apology for the “sexism” of Knocked Up now has an open calendar. This exchange, besides being a vicious return serve in the gender wars, is one of many moments that mark Forgetting Sarah Marshall as the Apatow movie that is most desperately confused and hostile toward the women participating in its hijinks. It’s another sex comedy with another director-for-hire (Nicholas Stoller), and it takes the attitude that sex is a wholesome and laudable activity for every person to enjoy—unless that person is your ex, in which case she must be punished.

Segel was born to play a dumped boyfriend; his slumping features always seem on the brink of collapsing into a weeping jag. He has two potentially excellent foils in Bell (the Veronica Mars sparkplug) and Mila Kunis (That ’70s Show), who plays a hotel desk clerk who considers making a detour to Peter’s room. For most of the movie, the girls are simply forces for Peter to flail against, but then Sarah lets loose with the reasons she decided to leave him. She paints a scathing portrait of a man who destroyed his relationship by doing nothing. It’s a typically Apatovian moment of self-realization—the spell of self-pity broken by a tearful accusation.

But this time it’s a feint, an obligatory epiphany that must be immediately dropped, because Forgetting Sarah Marshall cannot allow ambiguity to muddle its mission. For Segal and Stoller, Sarah is a representation of all the women who have ever cheated on a nice guy—she is, in other words, a synecdochebag. So even as she begins to reveal herself as a three-dimensional character, the screenplay busies itself making sure every character is granted a measure of forgiveness, except her. In fact, a movie that is ostensibly about a man dealing with rejection turns out to be a conspiracy to humiliate the woman who rejected him. There’s something deeply ungallant, to say the least, about a film that saddles Kristen Bell with the indignity of giving her ex-boyfriend a blow job as a last resort to gain his forgiveness, and then blames her when he can’t get hard. (Peter’s parting explanation that she’s “the goddamn devil” is both untrue and unkind.) Forgetting Sarah Marshall tries manfully to live up to its title, but then it remembers her—and decides to fuck her over. Promise broken. R.