Between D*ck Jokes, Judd Apatow Upholds Traditional Values

Quick! Think fast – who’s making the most morally conservative films in Hollywood?

The answer may surprise you, but it’s none other than Judd Apatow. Yes, the writer-director of “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up” and the new film “Funny People” might have a reputation for creating profanity-filled R-rated raunch, but in reality they’re actually films that uphold traditional values. And the fact that Apatow sneaks messages that are pro-life in “Knocked Up,” anti-promiscuity in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and (SPOILER ALERT) upholds marriage against the temptation and forgiveness of infidelity in “Funny People” under the surface of all the dirty talk, means that he’s found a way to preach to far more than the usual choir and spread positive moral messages to those who might otherwise never choose to hear them.

I remember the night I first walked in to see “Virgin” back in 2005. I thought that it would just be one big sex comedy poking fun at the titular character. But as written by Apatow and the film’s star, Steve Carell, the film actually turned every convention one might have expected upside down.

Carell’s Andy had the “problem” of being a 40 year-old virgin, but after initally laughing at him and trying to get him laid, Andy’s co-worker friends slowly start to respect him. One who brags about cheating on his girlfriends winds up turning monogamous when he sees his impending baby on an ultrasound, while another may find his perfect match with a kinky gal but by the end it’s true love nonetheless.

More pertinently, Andy’s journey into true love with a divorced mom played by Catherine Keener involves him hiding his sexual neophyte status by challenging her to have 20 dates together before they have sex. She finds it unusual, but as a cute montage winds up showing, the film shows that getting to know each other well is more important to a healthy long-term relationship than casual sex.

Along the way, the film also takes sharply pointed stabs at our sexually saturated culture, both in a scene where Andy tries to run from a giant bus ad featuring a couple in the throes of passion only to stumble across other sexual images everywhere else around him, and in a particularly strong scene that takes dead aim at how Planned Parenthood-style clinics would rather push an anything-goes-with-a-condom message at teens than to encourage abstinence.

Ultimately, Andy and his beloved wait until after they’re married to have their first joyous moments of ecstasy together, and he’s so happy by the end result that he and the entire cast burst into a surreally funny dance routine to the strains of the giddy hippie classic “The Age of Aquarius.” And the movie broke both Carell and Apatow into the mainstream bigtime by scoring $120 million in the US alone, with my opening-night audience walking out at the end in excited discussions about the film’s refreshingly different attitudes.

How many other films with those kinds of messages would have been played outside of a religious event?

Leap forward two years, and Apatow took on unplanned pregnancy in “Knocked Up,” where a stoned slacker played by Seth Rogen impregnates an ambitious young TV personality played by Katherine Heigl during a one-night stand. Heigl’s character’s mother tells her not to blow her new on-camera career and that she can have a “real” baby later – and that moment is what propels her to keep her baby and sets the movie on its exploration of how the stoned dude is ruining his life with his irresponsibility and shows him the joys of putting down the bong and picking up a relationship.

Apatow took some heat for the film’s stance on abortion, with the liberal newspaper LA Weekly grilling him about the scene between Heigl and her mother. The Weekly writer asked him why he took the pro-life route and compared his film to the Romanian drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” which depicts a woman’s search for an illegal abortion in the former Communist nation. Apatow pointed out that if an abortion had occurred, “Knocked Up” would have been 15 minutes long and that while there’s a place for “4 Weeks” in the market, he doesn’t have to make a film that way.

“Knocked Up” even took a strong whack at the stoner lifestyle, as Rogen’s character has to learn to put away the pot and get a job in order to step up and truly be a good man for Heigl and their baby. As the LA Weekly noted in a Scott Foundas article on the film:

That extends to the film’s laissez-faire depiction of drug use and alcohol consumption – a subject about which Apatow has mixed feelings. He is himself strongly anti-drug, he says, “but at the same time, as a filmmaker, I just need to show things exactly as they are. I hope, on some level, I’m indicating to the audience: You probably shouldn’t do this, that you can’t be the high guy when the earthquake happens and you have to figure out how to shut off the gas.”

And now we have “Funny People,” which doesn’t directly address a moral quandary in its title, but which explores the attitude of entitlement some people have in which they think they can pursue whomever they want romantically, damn the consequences. When Adam Sandler’s lead character, superstar comic George Simmons, overcomes a bout with cancer (I didn’t spoil it – that’s revealed in the trailer) he sets out to get the Girl Who Got Away, not caring at first that she’s now married to another guy and has kids.

(SPOILER ALERT) Simmons does have a quickie with his dream woman, but ultimately he comes to realize that her husband isn’t a jerk and his dream girl and her husband opt to forgive each other and stay together, while Simmons walks out of their way.

Once again, marriage is upheld as the ideal and traditional values win. The fact that the film’s packed with dick jokes still doesn’t change that, and helps lead people who might be looking for a naughty night out at the movies to have a morally sound one as well.