Most of us have had the painful experience being dumped, and that is what "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," which premiered on this day in 2008, was about.
Jason Segel, who will probably always be remembered for the role he played in How I Met Your Mother, played a composer who worked on the same TV detective show in which Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) was a co–star. They had been lovers for quite some time, too — until Sarah rather unceremoniously dumped him early in the movie for a British rock star (Russell Brand).
Granted, that's a higher altitude than most of us reach in our relationships, but it is still possible to empathize with Segel's devastation — especially considering that he was naked when she told him it was over. Film critic Roger Ebert referred to it as "a humiliating, emotionally naked break–up and breakdown."
And it was. I felt it was one of those movie moments that you only want to see once — if at all. It almost felt like intruding on what was a very personal and very private experience.
Segel did everything he could to get over Sarah, but nothing worked. So he decided a change of scenery might help, and he went to Hawaii. Turned out Sarah and her rock star boyfriend were staying at the same resort.
It was at that resort that Segel's character encountered a hospitality clerk (Mila Kunis), and she became his new love interest. In the process, he learned more than he probably wanted to know about Sarah Marshall — like the fact that Sarah and the rock star boyfriend had been having sex for a year before she dropped Segel.
Eventually, Sarah came to realize she had made a mistake, but it was too late.
Ebert thought the story was told well, but I disagreed. Far too many of the lines were about sex, either directly or indirectly. And while that is an important element of relationships, it is hardly the only one. Trust plays a big role, too, and the messages about trust were mostly implied — whereas the jokes about sex were, if anything, a bit too much in your face.
"We all do stupid, destructive and self–destructive things for which we're probably not going to forgive ourselves," Ebert wrote, "so the best thing in the world is when somebody else forgives us. In the movie's moral universe, there are no irredeemably bad people — just those afflicted to various degrees with shallowness, immaturity, selfishness, obliviousness, ambition."
I can't argue with that — but I also can't deny that the humor was often sophomorish. I didn't agree with Ebert's glowing assessment of it.
