This Is 40 has been marketed as the everyman’s movie about what it truly is like to be 40 years old in the US, complete with family, temptation, and job issues. Maybe Director Judd Apatow was trying to show America what his version of 40 is like. Filled with a freeform plot, unnecessary subplots, and lack of basic understanding of the main characters’ predicament, This Is 40 reeks of artifice. Only rarely does This Is 40 hit close to home, and, like Apatow should have done, it is during the day-to-day activities, not the big decisions.
Labeled as the sort-of sequel to Knocked Up, This Is 40 tracks the married couple from that film, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) as they approach their joint 40th birthday party (Debbie lies that it is her 38th). It tracks the couple through all the aspects of their daily lives: the relationship with their kids Sadie (Maude Apatow) and Charlotte (Iris Apatow), their work stresses, their relationships with their parents (Albert Brooks and John Lithgow), and various other scenarios.
This Is 40 is at its best in the intimate day-to-day activities of what it is like to be 40. Whether it be interruptions during sexual activity or inspecting a sore in a private area, This Is 40 is at its best when it is a fly on the wall during this couple’s routine. Mann and Rudd are very good at making each ubiquitous sequence unique to the story and relatable.
Unfortunately, Apatow decides to throw too many ideas into the story that would best be served on the cutting room floor. Mann’s store stealing involving Megan Fox has funny material, but serves as a distraction 98% of the time. The pair’s broken relationship with both parents is used as a driver for a story that doesn’t exist and ends up spinning its wheels until the eventual blowup. Worst of all, the financial troubles are not based in the character’s reality. There are very easy fixes to their problems that the couple never get to face because of cop outs by the story (plus, their house is a palace and they clearly spend way too much money on frivolous things). Perhaps Apatow thought jumping around would keep his story from becoming too mundane, but in the end the jumping distracts from the really good stuff.
The fault is not the central couple. Rudd and Mann are very good here, given lots of chances to become shrill/grating, they find ways in most scenes to right the ship. Apatow’s youngest, Iris, is very cute, but Maude comes off more shrill because they wrote her as just getting her period. The best moments for Sadie involve Lost, but otherwise she is not written very well. Jason Segel and Patty O’Dowd are very funny and John Lithgow strikes the right note as Mann’s dad. The real standout here is Megan Fox; just because her scenes are unnecessary doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to land a joke really well. Her scenes were probably not cut because material involving her is the most funny in the movie. Albert Brooks, Charlene Yi, and Lena Dunham are poorly written and easily forgotten.
This Is 40 should be followed with a question mark for everyone under 30. I don’t have any idea why anyone would subject themselves to such pain and nonsense with no basis in reality. The redeeming part of This Is 40 is that Judd Apatow should be a producer for Megan Fox’s next career move. Until then, please forget this misfire that can best be described as probably “A Judd Apatow home movie.”