by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I the 2008 romantic comedy Forgetting
Sarah Marshall, produced by Judd Apatow,
directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by and starring Jason Segel. He plays Peter Bretter, a
typical Apatow schlub leading man
who’s the composer for a hit TV series called Crime Scene: Scene of
the Crime (the show, which we see in some
surprisingly sexually explicit clips — the murders its detectives investigate always
seem to involve a male victim who had just reached a sexual climax when he was
killed, is an obvious parody of both the CSI and Law and Order franchises). For five years he’s been in a live-in
but unmarried relationship with, you guessed it, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell),
the show’s sexy but butch female lead (of course I couldn’t help but compare
her to Mariska Hargitay in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit!), only one morning for reasons she at first is
ambiguous about Sarah tells him that she’s leaving him. She does this while
he’s naked, and at least in the unrated extended cut on the DVD we were
watching we get to see him full-frontal (his cock is decently sized but nothing
to write home about, which is a pretty good description of the rest of his body
as well). Eventually she admits that she’s involved with another man, rock star
Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), leader of the band Infant Sorrow which has a
penchant for writing banal socially-conscious songs and doing videos of equal
pretentiousness, including one that parodies the opening of the Bob Dylan
documentary Don’t Look Back in
which Snow holds up a sign reading, “Sodomize intolerance.” (But what if
intolerance likes being
sodomized?) Peter’s scapegrace stepbrother Brian (Bill Hader, who’s rather
dorky-looking but still is sexier than Jason Segel!) and Brian’s wife Liz (Liz
Cackowski) advise him to cruise the bars and pick up as many women as he can
for anonymous, meaningless sex, and despite his general lack of attractiveness
(he’s not bad-looking, he’s just
not that good-looking either!) and his total lack of seduction skills — he’s
the sort of man who flat-out tells a woman he wants to fuck her instead of
going through the usual build-up — he actually has a surprising amount of luck
in that department. Brian’s next piece of well-meant but dumb advice to Peter
is that he take a vacation and get away from everything that reminds him of
Sarah Marshall — and instead of doing a ski resort in the Alps, which is
Brian’s suggestion, Peter decides to go to Hawai’i.
Unfortunately, he can’t get
away from Sarah Marshall there,
either: he sees her delivering a commercial for Hawai’ian tourism on the plane
going over there, he stays at the same resort she recommended to him years
before, and she’s there in person spending an island idyll with Aldous just
before his band embarks on an 18-month world tour. (Aldous wants her to join
him on the tour as one of what he calls the “infant suckers,” and doesn’t see
why she can’t — especially since the network has just canceled Crime
Scene: Scene of the Crime. We get the
message: like Keith Carradine’s characters in his mid-1970’s films Nashville and Welcome to L.A., he’s the sort of man who uses women like Kleenex.)
When he arrives he finds out that the only accommodation available in the
resort is the “Kapua Suite,” which is reserved especially for celebrities like
Oprah because it costs $6,000 per night and therefore they’re the only ones who
can afford it — but the hotel’s desk clerk and social director, Rachel Jansen
(Mila Kunis), offers it to him at a discount if he agrees to clean it himself.
Once writer Segel gets all four of his principals in Hawai’i — is it
really going to be that much of a surprise that Peter is attracted to Rachel,
or that Segel and Stoller carefully build her up to the point where we feel she’s a much better match for him than Sarah
is? — he seems to be going on a checklist to make sure he gets all the typical
Hawai’ian elements into his script, including surfing (a guy named Kono gives
Peter surfing lessons and Peter is, of course, hapless on a board), luau (a
large Hawai’ian who looks like the guy in the Kona beer commercials enlists
Peter to help stick the pig that’s going to be the main course — incidentally
Kona seems to have had a product placement in this film since the beer the
characters drink when they’re not loading up on more exotic alcoholic potables
— all except Aldous, who went through a drink-and-drugs crisis seven years
earlier and is now working overtime to maintain his sobriety — is one of Kona’s
brands) and Hawai’i’s spectacular scenery, including a hill climb and a leap
off a cliff into a lagoon which Rachel dares Peter to do. (This is a pretty
obvious cop of “Leonard’s Leap” from the 1937 Fred Astaire musical A
Damsel in Distress.) While all this is
going on Peter is also more-or-less working on his next project, a musical
adaptation of Dracula called A
Taste for Love which he intends to stage
with puppets, and which Rachel encourages him to complete even though Sarah
thinks it’s stupid. (They’re both right: eventually Peter stages the show after
he realizes the whole concept is so ridiculous the only way to make it work is
to turn it into a spoof.)
The film ends much the way you expect it to, with
Sarah getting abandoned by her hot rock-star boyfriend and turning to Peter on
the rebound — only Peter is so uninterested in her by then he literally can’t get it up with her, and eventually Rachel
takes him back and the two fly back to L.A., where he puts on his Dracula musical and she returns to college after having
dropped out to live in Hawai’i with her surfer boyfriend (who’s now her surfer ex-boyfriend, though he’s still jealous enough of anyone
else she sees he beats them up, Peter included) — we’re never told what she was studying or what sort of career she was
preparing for before she dropped out. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is an obvious modern-day attempt to revive
1930’s-style screwball comedy which, like a lot of other such attempts, is
hampered by the absence of the kinds of actors needed to make farces like this
work. The obvious choice for Jason Segel’s character in the 1930’s would have
been Cary Grant, who could do comic exasperation and romantic glamour equally well — he could look like a
nerdy ditz throughout an entire movie and then suddenly come on as the epitome
of male sexiness in the final reel, and he didn’t have to flash his dick at the
audience to do it! That’s another problem with this movie: the greater sexual
frankness available to modern-day moviemakers since the Production Code
collapsed in the late 1960’s has the down side in that Segel and Stoller don’t
have to work as hard as their 1930’s counterparts did to suggest sex in subtle ways. Segel even copies one of the
most famous gags from Noël Coward’s play Private Lives — thrown out of the Kapua Suite because Dakota
Fanning and her entourage need it, Peter lands another suite that happens to be
right next to the one in which Sarah and Aldous are staying. Only instead of
just walking between the connected balconies of each room and running into each
other there the way Coward’s protagonists did, the broken-up couple, each
stationed with their new partner in rooms with only a paper-thin wall between
them, hear each other having sex. Peter and Rachel are having a great time;
Sarah fakes an orgasm to try to keep up with the competition, but the
well-practiced Aldous catches her and knows she’s faking it. There’s also an odd comic-relief
couple (yes, this is one of those comedies, like the 1937 Artists and Models, in which the writer thought the comedy needed comic relief!),
newlyweds from religiously conservative backgrounds who are having trouble
figuring out how to have sex and actually enjoy the experience.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is an O.K. movie with some inspired dialogue and
situations; one gets the impression it could have been better than it was but
as it stands it’s a pretty good time-filler even though director Stoller
reprised the character of Aldous Snow (once again played by Russell Brand) two
years later to better effect in his film Get Him to the Greek, in which Snow has fallen off-the-wagon big-time
following the failure of his pretentious concept album African Child (which a reviewer blasted as “the worst thing that’s
happened to Africa since apartheid”)
and the breakup of his marriage to a supermodel (were they thinking David Bowie
and Iman?), and Jason Hill — who appears in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as a bartender at the resort who futilely tries to
get Aldous Snow to listen to his demo CD of a new song he wants to sell him (in
real life a star like Snow would never listen to a demo he got outside the normal channels for fear of being
sued by plagiarism, and a better writer than Jason Segel would have had him use
that as an excuse why he hasn’t played it) — as the hapless roadie who has to
get Snow to the Greek Theatre for his big comeback concert and, once there, to
prompt him on the lyrics to his songs since in his drink- and drug-soaked haze,
he’s forgotten them. Get Him to the Greek is a funnier movie than Forgetting Sarah Marshall, largely because the stoned Aldous Snow is a
considerably more entertaining character than the sober one we get here. One
reason Forgetting Sarah Marshall
stuck in my mind even though I hadn’t seen it before and it’s 10 years old is
that when it was first released, Universal rented planes to fly skywriting
messages like, “I Hate You, Sarah Marshall,” over cities in which it was
playing. Women who were actually named Sarah Marshall reported getting phone
calls from concerned friends wondering if everything was O.K. with their
husbands or boyfriends, and a few of the real-life Sarah Marshalls went to the
authorities to see if there was any legal way they could stop Universal from
doing these overflights denouncing them. Of course, there wasn’t, and all they
could do was reassure their friends that they weren’t going through real-life
breakups and those sky-written messages were just a studio’s stupid trick to
promote a movie!
