Knocked Up Review

The premise is a sitcom pitch and the film treats it as a character study. Rogen plays Ben as a man who is funny because he has nothing else, and the picture patiently strips that away until he has to become something. Katherine Heigl gives Alison more spine than the script strictly requires, and the best material is not the pregnancy at all but the Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann marriage running alongside it, which critics single out as the most honest writing Apatow has done.

The dialogue is why the film survived the decade, loose enough to sound overheard and precise enough to land. The reservations are real. Two hours and nine minutes is a great deal of movie for this story, the improvisation lets several scenes run well past their point, and the women are written with less curiosity than the men, a complaint that has only grown louder with time. The camerawork is functional and knows it, which is the one craft axis nobody defends. What holds is the tonal control, crude in one line and genuinely frightened about adulthood in the next, and a cast that plays people rather than positions.