Humanity shows in 'Sarah Marshall'

By Dan Moore
April 25, 2008

Before we go any further, yes: In "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" you will see Jason Segel's penis no fewer than four times. The good thing is that the scenes are funny, with the rare male full-frontal shot played for all the value of its shockingness and off-kilter comic timing. The bad thing is that those gimmicky shots have thus far overshadowed the rest of "Sarah Marshall," which might be the best Judd Apatow production yet. Lost amid the full-frontal fervor are the movie's excellent renditions of the other, less phallic "40 Year Old Virgin" tropes.

Segel, who also wrote the film, plays Peter Bretter, a would-be rock opera composer in a long-term relationship with a marginally famous TV star, the titular Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). She breaks up with him — yes, while he is naked — and he flies to Hawaii to be as far away from her as possible. Because this is a movie, she and her new boyfriend (Russell Brand, in an all-time-great character role as a pseudo-intellectual Britpopper) happen to be on a romantic getaway at the same resort.

The setting is one of the movie's major strengths. Segel peoples the resort with an endless procession of minor characters whose foibles allow for innumerable callbacks once they're put on the scene. Billy Baldwin, of all people, makes an outstanding appearance as Sarah Marshall's co-star in a TV show called "Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime." (His David Caruso-esque, sunglasses-removing one-liners are impeccable.)

But the heart of the movie, as with its Apatow siblings, is the humanity rarely seen in R-rated comedies. Segel's broken-down Peter is neither a saint nor a "Meet the Parents" super-failure. He makes a number of mistakes, some of which flout our expectations of the plot completely, and never seems quite able to get out the big Jimmy Stewart speech that would win over his ex or the lovely hotel clerk he has his eyes on.

But when everything seems to have failed we get a full dose of the Apatow second chance. Even Sarah Marshall herself, portrayed as out of her mind for most of the film, is given a few chances to explain her anxieties as an actress on a crappy TV show.

With all this going on, you can see why the penis in question might be as much a distraction as a draw. And — if I'm allowed, for a moment, to use the penis as a metaphor, possibly for the first time outside a Dan Friesen column — it's a harbinger of a worrying trend in the Apatow world. It's almost like there's an ongoing contest to out-gross each preceding movie, and after "Sarah Marshall" and "Superbad," it's going to be difficult to do that without taking the off-color humor ascending to truly distracting levels. The pop skewers, from "Crime Scene" to a faux-environmentalist music video, tend to be more enjoyable than the film's overlong and, by now, customary profane moments.

But that's only nit-picking what is, as expected, one of the best comedies in recent memory. With Jason Segel's penis or without, it's a worthy addition to the Apatow oeuvre.

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Humanity shows in 'Sarah Marshall'

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