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Taking a couples comedy for another box-office spin

Jason Siegel, beer of the month from the Judd Apatow comedy microbrewery, is one long pour of stout. As Peter Bretter, a TV composer dumped by his celebrity actress girlfriend (Kristen Bell) in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Siegel combines Albert Brooks' sad-eyed clown with Will Ferrell's bubbly clutz.

Kristen Bell is actress Sarah Marshall, with her seemingly more appropriate boyfriend Russell Brand as a British rocker. But what’s appropriate anyway in a Judd Apatow production?
Kristen Bell is actress Sarah Marshall, with her seemingly more appropriate boyfriend Russell Brand as a British rocker. But what’s appropriate anyway in a Judd Apatow production?Read more
    by Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic | Columnist
    Published 

Jason Siegel, beer of the month from the Judd Apatow comedy microbrewery, is one long pour of stout. As Peter Bretter, a TV composer dumped by his celebrity actress girlfriend (Kristen Bell) in

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

, Siegel combines Albert Brooks' sad-eyed clown with Will Ferrell's bubbly clutz.

Not always nimbly, Siegel (who wrote the screenplay) juggles dyspeptic bitterness with yeasty sweetness, proving that clumsiness is the pith of prat and pratfall.

Like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Sarah Marshall has all the ingredients of the Apatow brand. Alas, it is beginning to feel generic.

Relationship slapstick? Check. The calvary of male vulnerability and humiliation (i.e., frontal nudity, public displays of weeping)? Check, and check. Helpful pals hindering the friend in need? Check. An unattainable beauty who hooks up with a guy a little on the schlubby side? You betcha. (In Sarah, that would be both Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell, yin and yang of cuteness.)

Apatow and acolytes (including Nicholas Stoller, who makes his directorial debut with Sarah Marshall) know that these ingredients are a box-office happy pill. The average woman goes squishy at the sight of a sensitive guy. And for the average schlub, the message that extraordinary girls are hot for ordinary men has the reverse effect.

In Sarah Marshall, when love hands Peter a lemon, he squeezes, stings his eyes and blunders blindly from one excruciating situation to another.

After he is dumped, the Hawaiian resort Peter retreats to for wound-licking privacy is where Sarah has decamped with her Brit-rocker beau, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).

Peter, a gentle musician a tad on the soft side, can't help but compare himself to sinewy Snow.

Behold Peter, with his deflated self-esteem, and you think casualty of the love wars. Look at Aldous, whose inflated self-regard is not punctured by his multiple piercings, and you think, unstoppable love machine. Or the demon spawn of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Structured as an entertaining series of comic encounters, Sarah Marshall features Apatow regulars Paul Rudd as a stoner surf instructor and Jonah Hill as a hotel employee. Like the movie, they are sporadically funny. Yet, overall, the film lacks the crackle and snap of prior Apatow-zers. Sarah Marshall is familiar, if not fresh. Which is reassuring to those not looking for the new new thing.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall *** (out of four stars)

Produced by Judd Apatow. With Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Russell Brand.

Running time: 1 hour, 52 mins.

Parents' guide: R (frontal nudity, sex, sexual and drug candor, profanity)

Playing at: area theatersEndText

.Siegel