Since I went the whole week without reviewing anything on ReelGood, I wanted to make sure to see The Bubble as soon as possible. (It's been a schizophrenic time on ReelGood. Three weeks ago, I reviewed no movies. Two weeks ago, I reviewed four movies. Last week, I reviewed no movies again.)
But I actually took it one step further than that. I decided to get myself primed on Thursday night by rewatching my #2 of 2020, The King of Staten Island, which I've decided (after one viewing) is my favorite Apatow-directed movie, especially after The 40 Year Old Virgin came up short on a revisit last year.
I always suspected I have might like Staten Island more than I should have, though I do know some other people who think it's the bee's knees. A second viewing -- to confirm or reverse my initial impression -- had been in the back of my mind for a while now, and the Friday debut of The Bubble made a good excuse to finally get it on the docket.
Nope. I still loved it. Great movie.
The Bubble is actually a very different sort of movie for Apatow, a Hollywood satire that resembles something like Don't Look Up or (way back when) Wag the Dog in tone a lot more than it resembles something like This is 40. It's also a COVID-era satire more explicitly than any movie that has yet been made, or at least that I've seen.
And you know what? I really liked this too. A friend threatened to set me off on the wrong foot by messaging me, just before I started, that it was so bad he had to turn it off, but I laughed a lot and really enjoyed the absurd spirit of it.
I'm not here to talk in depth about either of these movies (there will be a review of The Bubble up, presumably on Monday), but rather, to talk about four key participants, who all happen to be in the same family.
Apatow has long been an ardent practitioner of nepotism, but as it turns out, he's one of those who gets away with it given the quality of what he's working with. When he casts his wife, Leslie Mann -- an actress before she met him -- and his daughters Maude and Iris, it's no Adam Sandler casting Jackie Sandler situation. These are three talented women, and they make his projects immeasurably better.
First let's start with Mann. I have been fond of her ever since I first saw her, in another personal favorite, The Cable Guy. Mann met Apatow while she was auditioning for the film. I'll admit I find her adorable, but she's also frigging hilarious. She has a real knack for comedy that has been on display in both Apatow's films (Knocked Up and This is 40 in particular), and those with which he appears to have no involvement (such as The Other Woman and Blockers). She can also bring it in scenes that are played more as drama, though examples do not immediately come to mind. And though she has made an appearance in many of Apatow's films, he's got a judicious sensibility for how to use her -- for example, she's not in either Trainwreck or The King of Staten Island. She's a spoiled actress in The Bubble, and Mann gets the perfect balance between going over the top and grounding the character in something familiar. She takes a lot of the ways we would expect her to play the role and flips them slightly, which is a strength of the film on the whole.
The family member who is in Staten Island is their older daughter Maude, who is currently 24. (They got planning that family pretty quickly after Cable Guy, though it should be noted that they obviously didn't rush things too much, as they've never looked back.) Maude Apatow has become known to people who watch Euphoria, though I am not one of those, so I know her from The King of Staten Island. (And about four other of her father's films in which she played children of varying ages, though I wasn't focusing on her work when I watched those movies.) The work she does in Staten Island is really strong. She takes a role that could have been a throwaway -- the main character's sister, who leaves for college early on in the narrative -- and gives it an incredible amount of specificity. She's a straight talker who shows equal parts love and annoyance with her wayward sibling, and she's got that New York attitude without overplaying it. The strength of her character shines through without her seeming like a saint, and it's one of a handful of smaller performances that gives this film its enviable verisimilitude.
The remaining daughter is Iris, who is 19, and who was also in those earlier Apatow films. I came to really notice her in the Netflix series Love, in which she played a child actress, and did so with a real -- here's that word again -- specificity. She was bratty but had a heart, and it's something she must have seen a lot in her peers, if not displayed herself, growing up in such a family. (The bratty part at least; the heart part is not so certain.) In The Bubble she plays a vapid Tik Tok star who is hired to appear in the film within the film not because of any acting ability, but because she has 120 million followers. There are a lot of ways to overplay a vapid Tik Tok star, but she resists all of those instincts to give us what a real 2022 19-year-old Tik Tok star looks like -- flat affect, above-the-fray attitude, and a way of dismissing you that is all the more eviscerating for its lack of effort. It's one of the funnier low-energy performances I have ever seen -- Steven Wright would be proud.
Nepotism most often annoys us, and rightly so. But some people who started their careers as favors to family members -- Sofia Coppola and Jason Schwartzmann within the Coppola family alone -- really blossom.
Others, like the Apatows, had it all along.
