It’s a little bit of a stretch to find a whole lot to admire in this weekend’s box-office success Knocked Up. In it, as you can guess, the leading lady (not exactly the right word), Alison Scott, played by Grey’s Anatomy beauty Katherine Heigl, gets knocked up after a drunken one-night stand with an unemployed 23-year-old slacker super-sized bonger slob (Seth Rogan). The f-word works overtime in the script, there’s lying, and Ryan Seacrest.
And Ryan Seacrest may be the most admirable character in the movie — he makes fun of himself in his cameo. The fictional characters, on the other hand, are all self-obsessed — parents acting like children, grandparents appearing long enough to make clear these twenty- and thirty-somethings didn’t have the best examples growing up.
But when Ben’s slacker housemate (one of four, most of whom are mean and dirty, in all senses of the word) Jonah suggests the “A” word to father-to-be Ben Stone (who usually
is stoned), his couch-potato crude loser friends can’t even contemplate the possibility. They even voice the word “kill.” Though Ben is very upset when Alison announces that her dozen or so drug-store pregnancy tests indicate she’s pregnant, he quickly realizes he reacted badly and slowly rises to the occasion — in the traditional ways, and also in ways you’d expect the director of
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow) to show you. When Joanna Kerns (formerly the mom on
Growing Pains) tells her daughter Alison to do what her sister did — think of her career (she’s an on-air interviewer at E!) and have a “real baby” later, when the time is “right” — there’s no question you’re repulsed. Alison’s going to choose to keep the baby and — besides there being no movie if she doesn’t — she doesn’t even seem to seriously consider the option. There’s no anti-abortion speech, she just does it: She just chooses to take responsibility for her remarkably irresponsible night out. She calls Ben and he sweetly provides support, echoing the words of his thrice-divorced but loving father (played by Harold Ramis).
In
Knocked Up abortion is presented as an option whose time has come and gone. You don’t get a baby “taken care of,” not when you can see the little one and her heartbeat on a monitor on the first post-conception doctor visit. Not when even loser Ben’s dad can tell him he’s the “best thing that ever happened” to him. Not when we know that Alison’s sister had an unexpected pregnancy, and that Alison wouldn’t have that beautiful but bratty six-year-old niece she loves.
That’s the refreshing part of the movie: There’s no question it embraces life. If you stretched optimism a little bit further you would see some kind of ode to marriage in it. First off, even Ben, whose only real relationship is with his bong, thinks he should “make an honest woman” out of Alison — proposing to her with an empty box and a promise that there’s a ring to come if he ever makes a killing off his “job” (a not-yet-launched website showing hot actresses in their movie nude scenes). And instead of laughing at the sitcom model of bitchy wife (played by Leslie Mann) abusing the nice-guy husband (Paul Rudd), we watch a mean wife nearly ruin her marriage. While hitting a club to celebrate her sister’s promotion (and her whole source of confidence being that she knows men there would want to have sex with her), she’s got her own husband so unhappy he feels the need to lie to her about his fantasy baseball league. (Not that he’s a model husband either; he lies about going to work when he’s actually going to a movie.)
The only reason we have hope for these characters is the baby, who only appears at the end. The baby doesn’t destroy Alison’s career. The baby nurtures a love between Alison and Ben, a very unlikely couple. The baby ultimately brings the unhappily married (for no real good reason) Debbie and Peter back together.
But as delighted as I am for the
Knocked Up message that sex has consequences (including unexpected joy and transformative love) and parents have responsibilities, there’s something about
Knocked Up that still leaves one a bit disturbed — and a little depressed. It’s pro-life and pro-marriage in its crude way. And it’s important that Hollywood isn’t making pro-life, pro-marriage movies just for more conservative audiences. Maybe I’m getting old, but it seems to me that the
Wedding-Crashers-40-Year-Old-Virgin crass-blockbuster fun has been had. While I’m all for redeeming messages (keep the baby, love the child, take some responsibility for your life) reaching us where we’re at, if this is where the culture is — 23-year-olds filling gas masks with marijuana smoke — is it really an excessively laughing matter? (And I say this as someone on record as
excessively tolerant.) With vagina shots and jokes and a bit of a celebration of loserism,
Knocked Up ultimately allows its beautiful aspects to be overpowered by its disturbing ones. It isn’t a likable-loser crude comedy. It’s a this-genre-may-have-just-hit-rock-bottom comedy.
