"Knocked Up"

Don't expect cutesy diaper jokes or starry-eyed mooning about innocence -- Judd Apatow's hilariously honest comedy refuses to fetishize parenthood.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Photo: Universal Pictures

Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen in "Knocked Up."

June 1, 2007 | Great comedies work on us the way great dramas do: They burrow deep inside, planting timed-release capsules of mood and feeling that may self-activate hours, or even days, later. Writer-director Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" is that kind of comedy, hilarious from moment to moment, but leaving behind both a warm glow and a sting. This is a picture that refuses to fetishize either the ability to conceive or the significance of our place in the universe once we've done so.

There's no self-congratulatory blather about parenthood as a higher calling: Apatow -- whose sweet-natured directorial debut, "The 40 Year Old Virgin," became a surprise hit summer before last -- suggests that good parenting, with all the flexibility and emotional commitment it demands, is as draining as it is enriching. There are no cutesy poo-poo diaper jokes here, no insider winking and nudging about how crazy-making our adorable little buggers are, and, best of all, no starry-eyed mooning over the way they bring innocence back into adult lives. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the moment in "Knocked Up" when Paul Rudd, as the semi-happily married parent of two supercute but hell-raising little girls, muses about how excited they get over simple stuff like blowing bubbles. His delight in their delight gives way to a purely adult brand of melancholy when he says, with comically exaggerated moroseness, "Their smiling faces just point out your inability to enjoy anything."

"Knocked Up" isn't just for parents, or for prospective parents: It's for any of us who have ever had to rise to an occasion, only to become paralyzed by fear that we're going to come up short -- which should cover just about everybody. It certainly applies to Ben (Seth Rogen) and Alison (Katherine Heigl) who, after a drunken one-night stand, discover they've inadvertently made a baby together. Alison is just getting her big break at the E! channel, where she works: Her boss (a slippery-smirky Alan Tudyk, of the late, great "Firefly") has given her the opportunity to be an on-camera interviewer. Ben is a tubby slacker whose four roommates (Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill and Martin Starr, each of whom gets the chance to be alternately aggravating and endearing) are also his business partners: They're working on -- although "inching toward" might be the better term -- a Web site that will inform users how far they have to wade into a specific movie to get to the naked girlie parts.

Neither Ben nor Alison is ready to become a parent, and their fears are only reinforced when they start examining the lives of Alison's sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann), and her husband, Pete (Rudd), whose marriage is visibly strained, partly -- though not wholly -- by the demands of parenthood. (Their two little girls are played by Iris and Maude Apatow, the real-life daughters of the director and Mann, who are married.) But for reasons that aren't, and don't need to be, spelled out, Alison decides to go ahead with the pregnancy. Ben, reluctantly, agrees to do his part -- except he has absolutely no idea what his part should be.

It's clear that Apatow doesn't intend "Knocked Up" as a right-to-life tract, and I hope it won't be celebrated -- or decried -- as such. The movie is simply delicate-handed enough to know that neither it nor the Supreme Court can dictate what a woman's choice should be. And it's intuitive enough to know that such a complicated choice can't be easily explained -- at least in terms that will satisfy anyone's politics. At one point Alison and Debbie's well-intentioned mother (played by Joanna Kerns) reminds Alison how a friend of the family became pregnant out of wedlock, had an abortion and then later went on to have "a real baby" -- a pointed reminder that even when we're faced with the most intensely personal of decisions, there's always going to be someone arrogant enough to think he or she knows what's best for us.

Still, in an age in which more and more couples wait until their mid-30s, or later, to have children, the mere idea of a woman in her 20s facing an unplanned pregnancy is something of a novelty. Newsstands carry magazines with weird titles like Conceive (whose motto is "Celebrating the Creation of Families") and Plum ("The First-Ever Pregnancy Magazine for Women 35 Years and Over"). When conception is harder to achieve, a fertilized egg becomes not the first tentative promise of a human being, but the Holy Grail, a reliquary for our awe and reverence, even when it grows up to be an overtired toddler having a temper tantrum in a supermarket. In the bizarro universe of white affluence, unplanned pregnancies are what happen to "other" people -- this isn't like the old days, when babies, both the planned and the surprise kind, just came along and you somehow dealt with them.

Next page: Uncomfortable laughs, as well as breezy ones