Every single review of Funny People that appears between now and its July 31 release is going to mention that the film runs a whopping 140 minutes, which is a lot of Adam Sandler for one sitting - too much Adam Sandler for most people.
But the weird thing about the movie is that even though it is clearly too long for the story it tells, I can only think of one sequence - the Thanksgiving dinner, which runs about three or four minutes - that I would have cut outright.
I suppose if I were president of Universal Pictures, the studio releasing Judd Apatow's new movie, I might have also asked him to at least shorten the scene in which the characters watch a videotape of Apatow's oldest daughter performing Memory from Cats.
But after that ... well, you wouldn't be hitting bone, exactly, but you'd definitely be carving prime beef. I mean, sure, you could take out the Eminem cameo and shave a couple of minutes off the running time. But then you'd lose the Eminem cameo, and it's really funny.
Both of the movies Apatow wrote and directed before Funny People also ran long (The 40 Year-Old Virgin was 116 minutes and Knocked Up was 129 minutes) and they were even longer in their "unrated" DVD incarnations. Apatow likes to kick back and hang with the characters he creates, and he encourages actors to improvise madly, resulting in comic riffs (like the "You know how I know you're gay?" scene from Virgin) that may not add anything essential to the movie, but are too good to lose.
Curiously, Funny People feels shorter than either Virgin or Knocked Up, perhaps because the story has a distinct three-act structure that keeps the film from overstaying its welcome, the way the Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall did (I liked that movie overall, but man did it dawdle).
Funny People's first two acts may have been already ruined by the film's overly detailed trailer. But the third act, which puts the characters in a completely different dilemma than they were in during the previous 90 minutes, has been left unspoiled for audiences to discover.
It will be interesting to see how the public responds to Funny People, which is Apatow's least genial and emotionally darkest film to date. It also casts Sandler in the role of a guy who turns out to be a bit of a jerk, and not the kind of jerk you like, either. Basically, he's an asshole.
But those who worried Apatow had pulled a James L. Brooks and gone all Terms of Endearment on us can rest easy: Funny People is many things, but a tearjerker is not one of them.
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