"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Get Him to the Greek" Review by litom

(I realize a double review perhaps isn’t the point of this forum, but I think the value of a review of Get Him to the Greek lies only in comparing it to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, so, you know.)

The first I heard of Forgetting Sarah Marshall were those billboards back in 2008—you know, the ones that said “I hate Sarah Marshall” and just gave the URL for the movie’s website. I was not moved to see the film, because, quite honestly, I thought it was going to be cruel. Between 2008 and this summer, I’ve since learned to enjoy the talents of Jason Segel, and I’m also currently in the throes of a Russell Brand archive binge, so I picked up the film and its spin-off, Get Him to the Greek. (If you need a summary of either, well, to IMDb with you.)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall absolutely proved me wrong. What I walk away from Forgetting Sarah Marshall is how incredibly kind of a writer Jason Segel is. I feared that the titular ex-girlfriend  would be put through the wringer, as well as her new beau, but the film lacks an antagonist. It’s simply about four people (the couple and their new partners) dealing with the fallout of a particularly awkward break-up, albeit splashed across the gorgeous backdrop of Hawaii. For every scene of Peter sweetly but hilariously breaking down, there’s equal time shared between Sarah, Aldous (the new rock star beau), and Rachel (Peter’s love interest), to flesh them out as actual human beings, which ends up in a scene where Peter tells Aldous that it’s hard to hate him.

Thusly, most of the comedy derives not from the awkward situation, but the awkwardness of the characters in that situation, which is what most comedies should strive for. Ultimately, the film pits Peter and Sarah, two people who like to take care of their partners, against the much more independent Rachel and Aldous, and how the two twosomes do and don’t sort it out. Of course, there are broader strokes throughout the film—in particular, there’s one gag involving Russell Brand and Jack McBayer humping giant chess pieces that runs a bit thin—but for the most part, even the smaller roles, like Jonah Hill as a hotel worker who worships Aldous, are more or less human, if hilariously awkward. From an Apatow film, I wasn’t expecting a weird little romantic comedy whose crudity serves the story and the characters, let alone a film whose male protagonist is a hopeless romantic. I was quite pleased with it.

I was much less pleased with Get Him to the Greek, although I really should have expected that. The problem with Get Him to the Greek is not the premise (there are no stupid premises—well, I’m sure there must be, but some stupid premises make good movies), but rather the fact that the movie is very confused about what it wants it to be. Forgetting Sarah Marshall knew exactly what it wanted to be—delightfully crude, essentially good-hearted, and romantic. Get Him to the Greek, in contrast, hesitates between wanting to be a raunchy bit of a caper, which it achieves in a scene where an attempt to party Aldous and his father into submission concludes with Aldous and Aaron being chased out of a hotel by Aaron’s boss, and a dramedy about a rock star drug addict coming to terms with the fact that his life is in shambles, informed by Brand’s own personal life.

Either would be good material for a film, but the confusion makes this a slog—well, that and the leaden pacing, which I found supremely weird. I was expecting something with an absolute relentless pace, given the premise of having to get a rock star from point A to point B in a set period of time. The movie eventually abandons its efforts to be a raunchy caper in the last half hour for the dramedy—failed threesomes and suicide attempts, anyone?—but it’s a bit too late by then to save the entire thing. The actors do their best—I’m not fond of Jonah Hill, but he’s sympathetic here—and there are some good jokes here and there; a sequence set to a French cover of “Imagine Me and You” is hysterical, and Rose Byrne’s serenely crass rock siren (as Aldous’s ex-girlfriend) is good fun. Sean Combs attempts to pull a Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder as Aaron’s boss, which only really works in the second half of the movie, in the scene mentioned above.

Ultimately, what I think is happening here is a confusion of audience. While Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a bit more romantic and emotionally mature than most of I’ve seen of Apatow’s films, it’s still aiming at a specific audience with its light and sweetly crude fare. Get Him to the Greek, in attempting to create the sweet portion of itself, inadvertently pulled up a darker story and doesn’t quite know what to do with it until too late. I’m one of those people who like to watch DVD previews (and VHS previews) to see what audience the home video distributor thinks it’s looking at; Get Him to the Greek had everything from Death Race 2 to Despicable Me. …yeah. I actually think I’d be quite fond of the dramedy, had it been fully developed, but I’m just underwhelmed by what I got.