While Apatow and the actors, writers, and directors who work in his orbit (jokingly referred to as Apatown) mostly get credited with turning sloppy slacker dudes into Hollywood icons, they actually deserve acknowledgment for something more subtle. From The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Bridesmaids, Apatown has turned out some of the most incisive movies about one of the rawest facts of adult friendships and relationships: People grow at different rates, and when they don't match up, the emotional fallout can be devastating.
Those maturity disparities, especially between friends, have been just as important to the tone and pathos of Apatown movies as romantic conflicts between babes and schlubs. In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell's pompous news anchor alienates his team when he embraces a female coworker (even if it's only so he can sleep with her). Andy, Steve Carrell's shy, emotionally stunted salesman in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, may live a life essentially defined by his lack of sexual experience. But the men who help him progress towards adulthood are just as damaged: They're insecure cheats or creepy ex-boyfriends who reevaluate their own lives as they help Andy move forward with his.
And in Knocked Up, Paul Rudd's married-guy Pete may want to hang out with Seth Rogen's slacker baby-daddy Ben, but ultimately, Ben's struggles to figure out how to be a responsible adult force Pete to confront his failures as a father and a husband. One of the saddest scenes in the movie is not between the two young parents-to-be, but the moment when Ben tells Pete how his parenting mistakes have made it harder for him to establish a family of his own:
Superbad is the first movie in the larger Apatow universe to put friendship, rather than a romantic or sexual relationship, at the center of the movie, and the emotions between Michael Cera and Jonah Hill's graduating high school seniors are so intense and painful that it's no wonder that some critics insisted that the real romance was between the two boys rather than the objects of their affections.
What makes Bridesmaids so refreshing is not just that it's the first Apatown movie where women fill up the screen almost to the exclusion of men. It's also that it's the first Apatown movie where the emotional disparities between the main characters come out of genuine and well-developed failures on both sides, rather than laziness or under-explored insecurity. Kristin Wiig's Annie has been through a series of crushing disappointments as the movie begins: The bakery she always dreamed of running has gone under in the recession, its windows papered over, and its sign vanishing letter by letter. Her relationship has been a casualty of the business's failure, and that double failure has crushed her spirit, leaving her rooming with a pair of spectacularly bizarre British twins and failing at selling jewelry to people whose happiness she finds almost unendurable.