Knocked Up

Synopsis: For stoner Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and TV journalist Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), the last thing they expected after a one night stand was to face the fact that Alison’s knocked up.

Following on from his 2005 directorial debut, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Judd Apatow in his second feature as a writer-director offers a similarly endearing modernization of the traditional rom-com with its boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back premise.

The boy in this instance is Seth Rogen’s Ben, a twenty three-year old stoner.  The girl is Katherine Heigl’s Alison, who has just got a promotion to the position of on-camera interviewer at the E! Entertainment television channel. He’s a dope-smoking shlub whose idea of a job is watching movies with his mates (Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel et al) for nude scenes that they will parlay into an online database for similarly minded dudes, She’s an eager-to-please young career woman who lives with her older sister, Debbie (Leslie Mann), husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and two nieces (played by Apatow and Mann's real-life children).  

The burgeoning and at-times prickly Ben-Alison odd couple relationship contrasted with the Debbie-Pete relationship worn down by mortgage and kids gives Apatow the opportunity both to crack-wise and to pass comment on modern male-female roles. In the former department the film is despite its profanities, surprisingly sweet. In the latter respect the film was criticized as being sexist (most notably by Heigl) for portraying the guys as fun-loving free spirits, the gals as their uptight, anhedonic micro-managers, their biological imperitives making monogamy a form of life-long house arrest for their victims.

It’s not an unwarranted criticism (albeit one infused with political correctness) and Apatow's writing is much more effective with the male characters than the female but I had more trouble with the casting of Heigl (replacing Anne Hathaway who was originally cast) her babe-alicious looks making Alison’s liaison with Ben’s overweight slacker an extremely unlikely scenario. Someone not quite as hot (like Sarah Silverman or Kristen Wiig who appears briefly here) would have given the film a valuable component of credibility whilst it is not easy to reconcile Alison's air-headed ambition to be a TV host with the insight required necessary to see beyond Ben's schlubby demeanour, an odd-couple relationship which was much better handled in Long Shot (2019) .

Notwithstanding, Knocked Up is an often funny film with enough intelligence to balance out its arrested development crudities.

 

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