Superbad
Superbad is frequently mentioned alongside other Judd Apatow blockbusters Knocked Up (very funny, hard to believe it only came out a couple of months ago) and The 40 Year-Old Virgin (my favorite comedy of the past few years). Yet, despite its pedigree, Superbad feels notably different from those two films, probably in part due to the fact that its script was literally (and famously) written by 14 year-olds.
In a way, a fitting title for this film would have been “The 17 Year-Old Virgins” (even if that would have been painfully derivative). It’s about many of the same angsts and struggles featured in Steve Carell’s amazing star-turn: fear of rejection, lack of comfort with one’s own body, the transcience yet enduring permanence of adolescence, and of course, chicks.
Featuring Jonah Hill as the constantly manic Seth and Michael Cera as the romantically naive Evan, the film is basically a simple quest chronicling the two best friends as they attempt to acquire a bunch of booze for a party where (imagine the coincidence) the girls they have crushes on will be. That these girls have personally requested that our heroes secure the sauce should make it obvious to the viewer that this task takes on catastrophic, unbelievably serious proportions (at least in the minds of our fumbling protagonists).
Of course, things go awry and pants get stained with (for the purposes of this review) anonymous fluids, and in the end lessons are learned about friendship, relationships, and the impending separation that friends must always inevitably endure. The reason I thought Superbad’s tone was different from the two other Apatow films probably stems from a variety of sources (notably, Apatow didn’t direct it), but in the end, this film lacks any sort of adult presence.
In Virgin, Andy is the hesitant voice of reason, and as we learn, he’s actually more psychologically grounded than the bunch of non-virgin crazies who figuratively (and literally, at the end) dance around him. The film is almost shockingly morally upright, as he and the love of his life actually wait for marriage to seal the deal. In Knocked Up, Katherine Heigl’s character (as well as Paul Rudd’s slyly embittered sage words of wisdom) are a couple of shining beacons of responsiblity and grownup-speak to Seth Rogen’s character, who slowly chooses to adjust his life and arrange his choices around the ethos of being more responsible and present, finding more meaning and happiness in domesticity than in the creation of porno-cataloguing websites.
Superbad concludes with a much less conventional ending, as its characters, drifting apart at the end of the film, more or less decide, “Okay, we’re not going to be able to spend every waking moment together forever. Let’s move on and try and score with girls.”
I can’t really claim to have a preference between the types of endings I’m describing, but they do seem tonally very different. The first two end with a sense of leaving something incomplete behind in the pursuit of happiness and wholeness, while the end of Superbad strikes me as being much more interested in the loss, the empty space left when a person decides to leave their childhood (and childhood friends) behind in the pursuit of something, as we see throughout the film, perhaps very vacant indeed.
In the end, it’s hilarious. But it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.