Get Him To The Greek

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 12, 2010.

As the pompous rocker Aldous Snow, Russell Brand was the best thing in Nicholas Stoller's middling romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) – especially if (like me) you weren't sure if you were seeing the real deal or the sharpest American send-up of British mores since This Is Spinal Tap (1984). By now it's clear that Brand was playing himself, or rather reprising the character we know from countless chat show appearances and photo shoots: the lechery, the swagger, the piratical dress sense, the earnest attempts at goodwill, and the deep affection for the sound of his own voice.

Now Aldous has his own movie, with Judd Apatow returning as producer and Stoller as writer-director. Also on board is Jonah Hill, who was Brand's sparring partner in Sarah Marshall but, confusingly, is meant to be a different character here. A fixture of the Apatow stock company, Hill is another actor with a narrowly defined screen image, as a husky dork prone to inappropriate man-crushes and sudden mood swings; Get Him To The Greek gives him a rare sympathetic role as Aaron Green, a intern at the fictional Pinnacle Records who has three days to escort Aldous from his London penthouse to a TV studio in New York, and thence to a concert in Los Angeles.

“This is your moment,” Aaron is assured by his boss Sergio – played with suitable intensity by none other than Sean “Diddy” Combs, who proves to be a more convincing lunatic than, say, Tracy Morgan. The concert is equally crucial for Aldous, whose popularity has slumped since the failure of his album “African Child” (dubbed “the worst thing to happen to Africa since apartheid”) and his break-up with pop star Jackie Q (Rose Byrne, for once perfectly cast). But it's a challenge for Aaron to keep his charge under control, given Aldous' limited attention span, raging appetites, and tendency to turn any encounter into an impromptu therapy session.

This may be the best Apatow production yet, partly because the ticking-clock premise generates a momentum that was absent in the meandering Sarah Marshall, and partly because the cinematographer Robert Yeoman (a regular Wes Anderson collaborator) knows how to convey a comic situation in visual terms, whether he's stranding Aaron at a crowded bar in long shot or using a wide-angle lens to suggest his drug-fuelled panic.

More than anything, the film works because Aldous' view of himself as a patient and reasonable man is a joke that never flags. Like a child, he's preoccupied with fairness: he doesn't demand much, beyond the instant satisfaction of every whim. In the potentially thankless straight man role, Hill retains some of the emotional delicacy he showed in last year's The Invention Of Lying, even as Aaron cringes through one highly personal humiliation after another.

While Apatow takes a producing credit only, his fingerprints are all over Get Him To The Greek and its preoccupations with celebrity power, male bonding and sexual embarrassment. Aaron starts as a fanboy, but gradually grows disillusioned with his hero – mirroring the relationship between the characters played by Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler in Apatow's recent Funny People, a defiantly self-indulgent film that merits a second look.

Get Him To The Greek is more satisfactory but also more conventional. The parodies of showbiz idiocy fail to mask a reverence for wealth and fame, with media personalities queuing up to mock themselves in the spirit of a celebrity roast. We're told that Aldous deserves redemption because his music makes people happy; but on the evidence, his songs are dreadful and always have been, even if some of them were co-written by the likes of Jarvis Cocker.

For better or worse, it becomes clearer with each successive release from Team Apatow that Hollywood's leading specialists in crude humour are also wholehearted believers in monogamy and clean living. Aldous is many things – philosopher, artist, clown – but mostly he's an alcoholic and a drug addict, a condition depicted with a certain grim realism. And for all the rock-star excess on display, there's no doubt whatever this is a moral tale: the underlying attitudes reflect the conservatism of Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) rather than the guilt-free orgy that was a comic highlight of Zoolander (2001).