Saw the movie last night. It is funny. You should see it. That said, in the hours between the end of the movie and right now, I've been discussing the film with friends over drinks and reading posts like this:
Apatow [fails] to write female characters who are quite as real as their male counterparts. I'll reserve judgment until I see the movie. But Knocked Up, however touching and entertaining it may be, certainly seems to fit with Hollywood's long history of professing pro-choice beliefs and then writing scripts in which women with minimum-wage jobs and no support system make last-minute decisions to not have an abortion, unplanned pregnancies end with deus ex machina miscarriages, and characters who do choose abortion are killed off in subsequent episodes. Most often, though, the A-word isn't even mentioned.
I'm pretty sure there are two things that every pro-choice, politically-minded person should be aware of going into this movie. One is that it's typical Hollywood boilerplate--a fat ugly schlub with no ambition and a bad marijuana problem is able to turn his life around in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Aptow uses that (frankly unoriginal) set-up as a vehicle for very very funny characters and situations. If you want to see a movie about characters in a similar situation who grapple with the question of abortion, then you want a different movie altogether--one that is probably not very funny, and doesn't sustain feature length.
Which leads me directly to the second thing. The reason a different movie would be much shorter is that, after spending a few minutes (movie-time) struggling to decide whether to keep the baby, and then deciding to have an abortion, girl character (Allison) would have almost no reason to have anything to do with boy character (Ben) at all. Because Ben is sort of a pathetic clown. Goodbyes, apologies, see-you-aroiunds, roll credits. But that's not to say that Aptow presents the consequences of deciding to keep the baby in a particularly realistic way. And I think there is a ligitimate, though small, critique to be made about that: It is a little bit vexing that these two people don't just find that their lives will go on after deciding to go ahead with the pregnancy. They find that their lives become better by miles. He gets himself a talented, successful, beautiful girlfriend who loves him and helps him turn his life around. She finds in him the kernel of a charming, funny, man--a man who helps her find in herself the ability to look beyond superficial appearances, and to appreaciate the goodness in people. That and she gets this awesome promotion as a direct result of looking like a fat pregnant woman.
Clearly this isn't how unplanned pregnancies ever really go. But Hollywood does this literally all the time--not just when having a baby is the issue. Ascribing to these particular filmmakers either political cowardice or motives more suspicious than that they wanted to make a light, funny, profitable movie is not really a fair or supportable critique.
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