The screwball of our discontent

Although in the minority, I like David Denby's work. As the most slavish Paulette (i.e. Pauline Kael acolyte) around, he managed to duplicate her snide dismissals and talent for limning a character or situation when Kael's own enthusiasm was ebbing (it's like a discophile enjoying Change in 1981 after Chic's hits had dried up). I even own Great Books, an earnest account of Denby's return to NYU to study the classics; in grad school and beholden to formalism, its petulant refusal to acknowledge the value of gender studies was as welcome as Henry James' prefaces (that's where the analogy ends). When Greil Marcus wrote his own snide dismissal in 2004, I thought it unfair: he'd picked Denby's curdled, rather embarrassing narrative about his own agonistic relationship with Kael. Easy target, I thought.

Denby's latest exercise in sincere befuddlement finds modern romantic comedy wanting beside -- you guessed it -- the triumphant silliness of the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties. The problem isn't with his premise; most intelligent filmgoers are probably as depressed by the privileging of "high concept" ideas over actual, you know, scripts. No, Denby is troubled by the preference of the contemporary filmgoer for slackers over the bejewelled playgirls and brilliantined boys that populated the movies of Ernst Lubitsch, Gregory La Cava, and Howard Hawks. Although Denby is smart enough to accept that the social context which allowed for this sort of milieu has vanished (indeed, never existed in FDR's Depression-racked America), he's repelled by our embrace of Judd Apatow's stoner heroes. He won't even give us the benefit of the doubt -- he thinks we adduce Seth Rogan's antics as proof of our resistance to the values of classic thirties screwball. He's in love, in short, with a myth; and if there's anything we've learned, myths can occlude the finest judgments:

As fascinating and as funny as Knocked Up is, it represents what can only be called the disenchantment of romantic comedy, the end point of a progression from Fifth Avenue to the Valley, from tuxedos to tube socks, from a popped champagne cork to a baby crowning. There’s nothing in it that is comparable to the style of the classics — no magic in its settings, no reverberant sense of place, no shared or competitive work for the couple to do.

Is he kidding? "No reverberant sense of place" (like Rogan's apartment and sister-in-law's house didn't smother us in their smothering verisimilitude)? The clue's in that rancid polarity, "from tuxedos to tube socks," as if we could choose, as if Knocked Up didn't articulate a discomfort of which Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey were incapable -- a real tapping into the Zeitgeist that Denby himself acknowledges ("the picture is unruly and surprising; it’s filled with the messes and rages of life in 2007")*. The second clue is Denby's dew-eyed elevation of those Woody Allen films of the late seventies. Certainly they're as ambivalent and messy as Knocked Up, but Denby upholds them as avatars of grace and elegance -- "they took romantic comedy to a level of rueful sophistication never seen before or since." Given Denby's roots in the upheavals of seventies cinema, I'm shocked he didn't cite Paul Mazursky's freewheeling, overloaded comedies (Blume in Love, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, or An Unmarried Woman) as better examples.

Since Denby's incapable of the dialectical play that distinguished Kael (or, hell, Lubitsch), he must distinguish, grindingly, like a scold you nevertheless can't help but pity, between "sophistication" and "adolescent stupor." That he really loves Knocked Up -- that he senses that Apatow's film is on to something, tapping into something inchoate in American heterosexual relations -- is unmistakable; but his brain, dulled by the whiff of pot smoke and the sight of Rogan and Paul Rudd in tube socks, has to punish his instincts. You can sense his delight in snapping, like a hippo, at what he thinks is a salient demurral: Apatow has no idea what to do with his female characters. Leslie Mann, he writes, is "not a lover; she represents disillusion." But she's a supporting character. Does Denby hold Eve Arden in Stage Door or Ruth Hussey in The Philadelphia Story-- both used as much for their talent for bitchiness as their ability to incarnate archetypes -- as examples of three-dimensional womanhood? (Were I to mention faggoty Kate Hepburn foil David Wayne in Adam's Rib Denby's righteous head would collapse).

This article, with its wasted space devoted to summarizing His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib as if the reader he was trying to address hadn't already seen them, does Denby no favors. Remember: Greil Marcus rather nastily wrote, "Nothing will ever rescue him from mediocrity" in that hit job. I fear that results like this are inevitable when you try to explain zeitgeists and such to an ageing audience -- you sound like a tabby stepping on piano keys.

*Knocked Up is probably the most lacerating film about modern romance I've seen in recent years. I like it more than any film I've seen since 2002.