Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic on film is going to take a meticulous filmmaker who can weave this devastating moment in time into the story. Despite his many successes and great comedies in the mid-2000s, Judd Apatow's latest release, "The Bubble," shows that he doesn't appear to be the right filmmaker to address the virus.
It's been written many times before - including by myself - but the inherent problem with making a movie centered on COVID is the rapidly changing state of the situation. While the pandemic isn't over and the term "post-COVID" is often used a bit too liberally, we are in a different place than we were in 2020 or early 2021. Releasing a film like "The Bubble" at this point, and taking us back to the beginning of it all, needs to be justified by what we see onscreen. Of course it's all a matter of timing, and many shoots were delayed on account of the various pandemic surges, but Apatow's new film doesn't have any introspection to offer; and, most damning, it isn't very funny.
Many people know Apatow from his early television work, but he became a mainstream hitmaker with the one-two punch of "The 40-Year-Old-Virgin" and "Knocked Up." Both films were hilarious and successful summer entertainment, like we don't see these days in theaters, but Apatow has never been able to capture that level of success-meets-quality again. It's not to say he hasn't made good movies since then ("The King of Staten Island" was a strong piece of semi-memoir comedy written by Pete Davidson and directed by Apatow), but as the movie landscape changes, so do filmmakers' work and, ultimately, their films reception.
"The Bubble" stars Karen Gillian as Carol, an actress who has to report to a hotel to quarantine before making a movie. She is hesitant to leave her home to go shoot a film, but the popular "Cliff Beasts" series awaits its sixth installment. Among the cast in the hotel bubble are Pedro Pascal, Fred Armisen, Leslie Mann, Iris Apatow, Keegan Michael-Key, and Harry Trevaldwyn. Maria Bakalova (the Oscar-nominated breakout star from the 2020 "Borat Sequel") co-stars as the front desk attendant, and Kate McKinnon makes an appearance as a studio head.
Through all of the uncertainty surrounding the unknown days of the pandemic, the actors' patience and sanity begin to wear thin as they are trapped in the hotel. They are obligated to go through the proper protocols to complete the film without any problems. When Carol reaches her breaking point feeling like a prisoner, she tries to rally the actors to make a break for it and escape the hotel.
Comedy is subjective, so some may find "The Bubble" funny, while others won't. It certainly strains for its pandemic-era laughs, mostly missing the mark by always feeling out of date. The common and almost universal complaint about Apatow's films is that they run much longer than necessary, and that holds true here with a 126-minute runtime. It's easy to appreciate a filmmaker and a group of actors doing what they can to make a movie under such challenging circumstances, but "The Bubble" never operates above the level of an overlong SNL sketch (great emphasis on overlong).
How filmmakers choose to incorporate the pandemic into their work will be interesting and it's certainly going to be present going forward. The pieces of work that are made because of the pandemic are much more interesting than those made about it. "The Bubble" is just interested in telling the same joke over and over, but who's even ready to laugh about it?
"The Bubble" debuts on Netflix April 1.
The Bubble Movie Review By Matthew Passantino
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