The title of This is 40 is a bit deceptive because the movie is as much about how a whole family copes with each as it is about adults turning forty. And the two kids of the main characters, played by Maude and Iris Apatow, daughters of the film's director, Judd Apatow, and co-star, Leslie Mann, nearly steal the movie from the adults.
I attended a special screening of the movie last weekend. It's a slice of life story that reminded me in some ways of Parenthood, but it's far more laser-focused on turning 40 than the overall trials of parenthood. It's hilarious in spots, sweet in others, but so many times, the story catches the truth of people in this phase of their lives.
It's speaks a lot for the movie that, as annoying as she can be, we see that the teenage daughter is sometimes right. I felt like the movie took my teenage daughter from a few years back and put her on-screen. (Aside: To my eldest, yes, I'm admitting you were right sometimes. But, hey, so was I. So there.)
Maude and Iris Apatow play Sadie, 13, and Charlotte, 8, respectively. And they're wonderful on screen, in fights with each other, making nice with each other but never funnier than with Sadie's obsession with Lost and Charlotte's insistence that she should be able to watch too.
In an interview session between Apatow and Mann with parenting bloggers last weekend, the question naturally came up about how the younger Apatows felt about enacting scenes that might be a bit close to home, especially as their mom plays their mom in the movie and their father was behind the camera.
Apatow said, surprisingly, they're not much affected.
"Maude turns 15 next week, and Iris is 10. But they're so bored of it. It's funny because their world is movies and comedy. The son of an insurance salesman wouldn't care about insurance. They kind of don't care in a way that's very healthy, I think."
It's not like they pay a lot of attention to the movie making process, he said.
"The kids don’t read the script. Maybe Maude at some point might have read the script. Iris doesn't read the script. She doesn't really know what we're talking about most of the time. But she did see the movie. I covered her eyes or ears at appropriate moments, but–"
Asked if his kids thought he was revealing too much of their selves in the movie, Apatow said definitely not.
"I think that she [Maude] knows that we're calling ourselves out on our worst moments. And it's not like we're goofing on her but we're not goofing on ourselves. I don't know exactly how she processes it, but what I tell her is that the best thing you could do as a creative person is to share your story with people because it makes other people feel less alone and it makes them feel better. There are a lot of people having these struggles. So, for her, I'm sure on some levels she realizes, "Oh, this is sibling rivalry. This is getting very emotional when you're a kid and your brain isn't fully formed yet," and we're very open about that. I'll sit and read the book, Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy in front of my kids. And I'll read passages out loud, and then just go, "Your brain is not built yet. You don't know how to self-soothe. So, I'm leaving the room for two hours while you do whatever you want to do."
Leslie Mann said she talked to her daughters about the difference between the movie and real life. "Well, our girls are pretty smart. And after work, we'll sit down and have dinner together and have creative conversations about all of this stuff and we talk about it in a different way. We understand that it isn't Maude's in on it and Iris is in on it. They're both like just fantasizing about what they would like to do."
Both parents said they thought the movie had actually made the sisters' relationship better because fighting on-screen was a bit therapeutic. But there is one element taken straight from their lives and that's Sadie's obsession with Lost.
"Maude watched Lost in six weeks and was just crying and emotional," Apatow said. "And Leslie and I were, like, "Well, she's 80 in, should we let her watch the last 30? What do we do?" And she was so upset all the time, and it made me laugh because when I was a kid, we didn't watch the entire series of Barnaby Jones in a month. It's a new phenomenon, this absorption of television and the Internet. So, she instantly jumps from that to Breaking Bad, and then she instantly jumps to American Horror Story. And is that good or bad? What does it mean?"
He added that the girls had watched all the episodes of his series, Freaks and Geeks, recently.
I'm tempted to see the movie again with my now 19-year-old daughter. Of course, I might get told that she was nothing like the movie teenager when she was 13. Or she might tell me I'm too much like the mom in the movie. So, maybe not such a good idea. Hah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm5SrRXd6Pc
