Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Regarding comedies that have had a measurable effect on my worldview, only two handfuls come to mind: Tootsie, Lost in America, Golden Age Woody Allen, This is Spinal Tap, Modern Times, some Frank Capra... There must be more, but even so it’s a short list in relation to more serious fare. Which is to say, most comedies, I think, have a hard time sneaking into the “relevant" column. So even though writer/star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller have loaded Forgetting Sarah Marshall with laughs galore, recalling affecting moments past the time it takes to write this review is not in the cards.
That's not a knock, per se; this is a movie I liked. Segel plays Peter Bretter, your
classic sedentary, ambitionless, movie schlump. When he's not at home eating bowls full of Froot Loops in front of the TV, he's writing the music for a low-rent "CSI"-type show, which his girlfriend Sarah Marshall (perky Kristen Bell) stars in. When she dumps him for a pretentious hyper-sexed Brit rocker (portrayed by Russell Brand with the no-holds-barred brio of the fake music stars in Andy Samberg's SNL shorts), Peter embarks on Operation Fetal Position, crying in bed, weeping at Heidi Klum's elimination of a contestant on "Project Runway," and wallowing in Sinead O’Connor love dirges. He embarks on a would-be rejuvenating trip to Hawaii, only to find Sarah Marshall on vaca there with the new bf. Bwaa bwaa bwaaaa! Luckily, the sexy brunette hotel hostess takes a shine to him, and the rest of the film concerns itself with whether he will re-connect with Sarah Marshall or continue this new romance. And, analagously: Can he get it together long enough to pursue his life’s dream of producing an Avenue Q-like puppet musical about Dracula?
The product coming out of the House of (Judd) Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Bad Boys, Knocked Up, this) occupies a niche I'd call lower-middle brow; not quite puerile, not altogether brainy. Where the Farrelly Brothers have made a mint exploiting reflexive giggling at bodily functions, the Apatow Way more subtly melds the juvenile with the cinematic, so that a lot of gags emanate from a facile use of the medium. It’s not that the movie's above using multiple full-frontal shots of Jason Segel’s naked and comically flaccid body, it’s that these short glimpses are strategically placed for maximum self-conciousness, on the part of the audience. Segel's just-short-of-fat corpulence economically communicates his eminent lack of qualifications for dating a TV hottie, and the gambit of flashing his flabby-guy ding-a-ling pays off in a titillating viewer awareness of never having seen such up-front male nudity at the Cineplex. These visual punchlines, frequently delivered by the editing, help create a riffing comedic tempo. At times the gags are so loose, off-beat, and fresh, you feel they must have been devised on-set, in the manner of the improvised "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The politics of the sexual quadrangle are also more nuanced than usually found in such fare. And, this being a break-up comedy, the lack of a Drew Barrymore presence cannot be overstated. A RomCom with teeth, Sarah Marshall would be an excellent Netflix "It's Friday night my workweek sucked I wish I were dead" pick.
Linkateria:
- More Sarah Marshall reviews
- 10 Sarah Marshall clips (CinemaBlend.com)
- 50 Greatest Comedies of All-Time (Filmsite/Premiere Magazine)

enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy a movie that takes place largely in a concentration camp. It’s based on the memoirs of
I once ate some mussels in Brussels. Rhyme and cobblestoned old world charm aside, the experience was ruined when a cowboy-hatted Louisianan and his posse sat at the table next to us and started filling the centuries-old streets with booming new world anecdotes about the oil industry, football, and other topics of conversation used to ward off old world effeteness. I offered the waiter a look of disgust in solidarity, but he made it clear that he thought all Americans were philistines. New York or New Orleans: That was just splitting cheveux.
urban renewal. It's in favor of community, locally-owned business, amateurism, and Fats Waller. Who can argue with that? No one, that's who, without seeming a spoil sport. But the film wears its artificial heart a little too much on its sleeve. Most of the goings on strain credulity, to say the least, and the characters at times exhibit a striking lack of common sense. These elements render the whole enterprise fablesque, which is another way of saying that while the Michael Gondry's production has its moments, it doesn’t really score any direct hits against or for the above-mentioned targets.


