By Eric Kohn

Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Directed by Nicholas Stoller

Oversized studio comedies with Judd Apatow’s seal of approval usually endorse a fair degree of sexism, but so do a lot of guys I know. Writing off a trite relationship comedy for favoring one gender over the other is like blaming society for being transparent. In last year’s Superbad, two pre-college seniors battled to retain their homegrown malfeasance before adulthood won out, drooling over every stray boob in the frame. The women were incidental—less characters than elements of a subjective landscape. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, however—the first major product of the year with Apatow’s endorsement as producer—crassly dissolves the gender balance in a vat of acidic testosterone.

Directed by Nicholas Stoller, Marshall follows Peter Bretter (Jason Segel, the latest Freaks and Geeks alum to snatch the limelight), a goofy slacker dumped in the first scene by his eponymous television-star girlfriend on the dawn of her movie career (Kirsten Bell, ironically in the same professional realm now). Depressed, Peter heads to Hawaii for a necessary escape, where he happens to find Sarah on vacation with the vapid celebrity (Russell Brand) she’s been secretly banging. The resulting love triangle finds Peter torn between his desire to win Sarah back or accepting the advances of an affable hotel clerk. Marshall frequently shifts to Sarah’s bewildered perspective, but it adopts Jason’s gradual revelation that he doesn’t need her by making us rejoice in her despair.

Although not a villain, Sarah becomes villainized: The movie remains sympathetic to the guy’s indolence rather than his former lover’s frustration over it. Brand’s character exists as an overtly misogynistic stereotype in order to make Peter seem valiant, but the extravagant qualities of the former are only elaborations on Peter’s comparatively subtler flaws. It’s not hard to understand why Sarah dumped him, but you’re forced to hate her for it.

Marshall feels simple-minded early on, but the entire plot reveals why. It’s a precise imbalance unfitting of a scenario that adopts several viewpoints, especially because this one has been done before. The Palm Beach Story, seminal writer-director Preston Sturges’ brilliantly unpredictable 1942 screwball comedy, follows another fractured couple to sunny terrain where they figure out their woes, with Joel McCrea as a failed entrepreneur chasing his allegedly divorce-hungry wife to the titular retreat. The scheming dame, however, has plans of her own, mining the pockets of a single millionaire to get her husband back on his feet. He’s hesitant to accept her infidelity as a sign of spousal allegiance until she justifies it with plain speaking. “So sex never entered into it?” he asks. Unhesitant, she fires back, “Sex always enters into it.”

In Marshall, sex enters into it, but only to give Peter clearance to swing his dick around (literally, given an extended gag showing Segel in the buff). A climactic scene that finds the couple in a sexual reunion has him stifling her incessant chatter with his sex organ—an unintentional metaphor for the futility of decrying sexism in a project that wholly embraces the flaw.