Big Screen, Small Stars

Matt Feeney, on Forgetting Sarah Marshall:

It’s typical for these breakup movies for the guy to upgrade from the desiccated, WASPy blonde who dumped him to an earthy brunette, but the contrast in this movie is so glaring that I actually felt sorry for Kristen Bell, who plays Sarah Marshall. (This is going to sound harsh. I wouldn’t write it if I thought Kristen Bell were a TAS reader.) Her character is a sort of parody of a television actress, but the thing is that she looks like a parody of a television actress. Where Mila Kunis is a sort of Rousseauan ideal of natural beauty, all litheness and fitness and proportion, Bell has the tiny body and oversized head that actors are said to often have, so that even when her whole body is on screen, her head still looks like it’s supposed to have a television around it. A television actress herself, she was obviously cast because of how closely she resembles the thing her character is supposed to be a parody of. So, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall Kristen Bell gets to literally embody her own parody. That is not an identity that – having called attention to it in such a way – you can just climb out of for your next movie. Given the roll that Judd Apatow is currently on, Sarah Marshall must have seemed like a dream part for Bell, but, to be honest, I don’t see how her career will recover from it.

Harsh but basically true, though I would differ with his take on Kunis: While I agree that her character was vastly more physically fetching than Bell's Marshall, I thought her performance, too, had the smaller-than-life quality that usually results when a television star gets miscast in a feature film. (Though she turned in better work than Jason Segel, who had the smaller-than-life quality that you'd expect if you cast that pretty-funny guy you went to high school with in a feature film.)

Matt also wonders if by calling the movie a "something of a dud" I meant that it wasn't funny at all, to which I'd answer with a resounding no. Large swathes of the movie weren't nearly as funny as they should have been, and a few sections - particularly the running gag about the uptight newlyweds - were just painfully unfunny. But one of the leads was almost hilarious enough to almost make the whole thing worthwhile. To wit: