Judd Apatow's Modern Family

This is 40

**½  out of ****

Directed by: Judd Apatow

Starring: Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Maude Apatow, Iris Apatow and Albert Brooks

Running time: 134 minutes

Judd Apatow is having a mid-life crisis and he is displaying it on film.

The comedy writer/producer/director started his career dazing back at the years of fortuitous adolescence with TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Then, he turned to telling stories about meek and wily men-children growing into adults (Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin). Since, he has been stuck with more dour and painful comedies, touching on themes of neglect amidst the family in Funny People and, now, This is 40.

Apatow, whose most recent triumph comes as producer (and occasional co-writer) of Lena Dunham’s excellent HBO dramedy Girls, is starting to frame his films more like television shows. This is 40 is largely episodic and often feels like the entire series of an inconsistent cable comedy thrust onto a big screen. The director's style, notable for its improvisatory, leave-the-camera-rolling realism - think of him as a modern, culture-savvy Cassavetes - is starting to turn tiresome.

Nevertheless, This is 40 is quite funny and usually painfully so, chronicling the staleness of marriage between Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow's real wife), who first appeared as the best friends in Knocked Up. Their children, Sadie and Charlotte, also return. The kids have fantastic comedy chops, which makes sense since they are played by the director's actual offspring.

The film is bookended by the couple’s birthdays – Debbie is in denial of turning 40 and so she turns the spotlight over to Pete’s milestone. Throughout, it tracks chapters of the couple’s experiences as they navigate through fussy children and financial strain.

Debbie, a boutique owner, has to figure out if her sex-crazed shopgirl Desi (Megan Fox) has been stealing funds from the store. Pete owns his own record label and is risking it all on selling a new album from underappreciated rocker Graham Parker.

Meanwhile, their family isn’t giving them much comfort either. Pete has difficulty relating to Sadie, his eldest, as she goes deeper through an infatuation of the hit TV series Lost, while Debbie takes out her aggression on one of Sadie’s classmates after the boy insults her daughter on Facebook.

Moreover, the husband and wife try to reconcile with their respective fathers, both of whom have remarried younger women and have children as young as Sadie and Charlotte. These fathers, played by Albert Brooks and John Lithgow, have intermittent relationships with their eldest children and are focusing their energy on new families. Along these first weeks as forty-somethings, the duo are constantly reminded not to blink as their lives unfold in front of them, although Pete and Debbie are seeing collision after collision.

This is 40 doesn’t have the propulsive narrative drive that some of Apatow’s other features have, and like many of them, runs a reel too long. The writer/director spreads around the chapters of Pete and Debbie’s lives so much that many of the scenes don't link to the ones before or after them. If any projectionist screening this film had switched reels (that is, if there was still one working an actual film projector), the audience would likely not notice.

Ultimately, the film works because of Rudd and Mann, who don’t just have prime comic timing but are terrific at changing their pace to the film’s trickier dramatic territory. Pete and Debbie are, inherently, deeply troubled characters who blame others for their financial, marital and parental problems. Well, at least they have each other to point fingers at. When a character remarks that Pete and Debbie are like a bland, artificial couple from a bank commercial, one can nod in approval of that cunning one-liner

Overall, one’s tolerance of This is 40 may depend on how much he or she enjoys spending time with two rich, rascally souls fretting about parenthood. It is strange to see Pete crying in a 5-Series BMW about the jeopardized future of his business. Ultimately, the film may work better as a satire of upper middle-class American families and their 'First World problems' than as the sharply observant comedy that Apatow intended. Mid-life crisis, not averted.