"Forgetting Sarah Marshall": review

L to R: Jonah Hill (Matt), Mila Kunis (Rachel), Jason Segel (Peter), Russell Brand (Aldous), Kristen Bell (Sarah)

[This post was originally written the night of October 3-4. WARNING: spoilers.]

2008's romantic comedy "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is directed by Nicholas Stoller (his first film) and written by Jason Segel. The film stars Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Da'Vone McDonald, Jack McBrayer, Paul Rudd, and Taylor Wily. I saw this comedy years ago and had forgotten most of the story beats, but I rewatched it tonight (the unrated version available through Apple TV) and found myself laughing like a lunatic all over again. I'm not normally a rom-com watcher, given how rigidly formulaic the genre is (even more rigid than your typical action or horror film), but the occasional romantic comedy has earned my respect, like "Hitch." "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," which contains some autobiographical moments from Segel's own life, is also in that pantheon.

Peter Bretter (Segel) does the musical score for a TV series called "Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime," which stars his girlfriend Sarah Marshall (Bell). Generally unmotivated and self-pitying, Peter spends his down time occasionally working on a rock-opera musical involving Dracula. Otherwise, he does little that's constructive with his time. While Sarah is away shooting her show, Peter lets their house go to hell, but one day, Sarah calls to say she's coming home early, and that she needs to talk to Peter. Peter desperately tries to put the house in order and takes a quick shower. Sarah comes home right as Peter is stepping out of the bathroom. She lets Peter know that she's breaking up with him, causing Peter to drop his bath towel in shock, leaving him standing there naked. Sarah eventually reveals that "there's someone else," then she leaves. Peter spends the next little while in a deep funk. His step-brother Brian (Hader) tries to cheer him up while also advising him not to go on one-night stands, which Peter does anyway—each encounter weirder than the one before. Brian suggests that Peter should take a trip somewhere, and Peter becomes fixated on Hawaii because Sarah had talked about one specific resort, Turtle Bay, that she thought was very nice.

Peter arrives in Hawaii, goes to Turtle Bay, and meets the pert front-desk clerk Rachel Jansen (Kunis), who allows Peter to stay in the hotel's most expensive suite for free as long as no celebrities ask for it. Peter spends his initial day in Hawaii wallowing in self-pity, wailing and blubbering like a woman. He slowly starts to come out of his shell, but he discovers that Sarah is also staying at Turtle Bay with her "someone else." This turns out to be British singer Aldous Snow (Brand), who is a weird mix of pretentious and cool. Peter refuses to leave Turtle Bay despite the awkwardness of being so close to Sarah and Aldous. As he loosens up, though, he makes the acquaintance of some of the staff and locals, including the pothead surfer Kunu (Rudd), the sexually frustrated newlywed Darald (McBrayer), Rachel's bartender friend Dwayne (McDonald), and the giant-but-laid-back Kimo (Wily). 

Most of the rest of the movie is devoted to Peter's awkward interactions with Sarah, his love-hate relationship with Aldous (who connects with Peter because they're both musicians), a starstruck hotel staffer named Matt (Hill) who worships Aldous and wants the singer to listen to a CD he's put together, and Peter's budding relationship with Rachel. The film's rom-com structure means that Peter will of course lose the girl at some point, and this point comes late in the film when Sarah, having broken up with Aldous, tries to seduce Peter. They get to the point where Sarah is starting to perform oral sex on Peter, who is having trouble getting excited but is initially fine with Sarah's pleasuring him. Peter has an attack of conscience, though, rejecting Sarah and calling her "the Devil" for breaking his heart and manipulating him. Guilt-ridden about the oral sex, he confesses his transgression to Rachel, who frostily demands that Peter leave her sight and never contact her. You surely know the rest of the rom-com formula, though, so you can guess how the story ends.

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" takes Dickensian coincidences to an extreme, with all of our main characters just happening to run into each other every five minutes. If you're not a fan of this plot contrivance, you're not going to enjoy this movie. I was fine with it because the movie did a great job of balancing ridiculous moments with more realistically human ones. After Peter has left Hawaii, and Rachel is still fuming, Rachel expresses her anger to Dwayne, who is surprised and filled with respect for Peter when he finds out that Peter pulled away from his ex mid-blowjob. "Do you know what that's like for a man?" exclaims Dwayne. "It's called blue balls, Rachel. This guy's like Gandhi, but better!" Peter's prickly relationship with Aldous Snow is also a highlight of the story: after Aldous breaks up with Sarah, he tells Peter that Peter deserves a medal for putting up with five years of that.

One thing I especially enjoyed about "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" was how the character of Rachel was written. She could have been written as a typical "manic pixie dream girl" archetype, but instead, Jason Segel wrote her character to have flaws of her own. Rachel wasn't simply a plot device designed to drag Peter out of his self-pitying funk. She was lively, unsure of her future, and wonderfully imperfect, and it doesn't hurt that 2008-era Mila Kunis is easy on the eyes.

All the actors played their roles to a tee, and the script gives many characters a chance to have some sort of funny moment. Paul Rudd's Kunu is hilariously daft, his head scrambled by so much marijuana that he can't remember Peter even after having seen and talked with him the previous day. Jack McBrayer's Darald is religious and uptight about sex while his voracious wife (Maria Thayer) is eager to try everything in bed from butt stuff on down. Taylor Wily's Kimo is there as a looming-but-comforting presence for Peter, offering occasional hugs and humorous sage advice when he's not asking Peter for help with slaughtering a pig for a luau. Bill Hader doesn't have a big part as Peter's stepbrother Brian, but he makes the most of his role as a perpetually stressed-out foil for Peter. Kristen Bell is excellent as Sarah Marshall, who comes off as a superficial, overprivileged bitch despite having one tearful speech in which she vents to Peter about how much she tried to salvage their relationship. Coming from another woman, this might have been powerful stuff, but when we later see Sarah crying her crocodile tears in an attempt to seduce Peter, we see she's essentially hollow inside, and her character undergoes no arc. Jason Segel, both as the star of the film and as its writer, essentially carries the story. He probably gets the most comic moments, including one quick scene in which he hilariously evokes Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm.

About one of those aforementioned autobiographical moments. Jason Segel is on record as saying the breakup scene at the beginning of the movie evokes a real-life scenario that happened to him in his late teens: his then-girlfriend had called him up, saying she really needed to talk to him. He decided to get into the iconic Burt Reynolds naked pose to greet his girlfriend when she arrived. She arrived, saw Jason naked and, undeterred, told him she was breaking up with him. Segel says he even did the "I got a suh-prise for you!" meaty dick-waggle portrayed in the movie. (While we get several full-frontal nude shots of Segel at the beginning and end of the story, the waggle itself is performed with the dick below camera level, and we hear the fleshy slapping sound of Peter's genitals as he joggles his hips at Sarah in a clumsily inviting way. Seconds later, she dumps him.)

The instances of humor are too numerous to count. Russell Brand is gut-busting as Aldous Snow, a pretentious fop wearing contradictory tattoos from multiple cultures who is nevertheless capable of showing surprising flashes of humanity. This film was made when Brand was still in his wild-child phase (for which he's being persecuted now), so one wonders about the extent to which Brand was playing a version of himself—something he continued in the quasi-sequel "Get Him to the Greek." Mila Kunis's Rachel is often a laugh riot, at one point taunting Peter when he's afraid to jump off a cliff and into the ocean by yelling, "I can see your vagina from here!" And Kristen Bell—who is also an amazingly talented singer (see "Frozen")—does a fantastic job of making the audience hate her character. The movie ends with a mid-credits joke that shows Sarah Marshall in a goofy new TV series after "Crime Scene" gets cancelled: a show called "Animal Instincts," in which her character is an animal telepath who uses pets to help her solve crimes. Earlier in the movie, Sarah had told Peter about how she desperately wanted to transition into movie work, but here she is, still stuck in TV hell.

Does "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" teach us anything about life, the universe, and everything? I'm not sure that it does. It's fairly realistic about how telling the truth in a relationship doesn't always lead to positive outcomes, and it offers complex characters like Aldous Snow, who is mostly a womanizing cad but also partly a decent fellow. It may be saying something about the importance of changing your life when parts of it are unsatisfactory; Rachel says this very thing to Peter at one point early on. Message or not, the movie is hilarious, and it's definitely one of the best romantic comedies out there.