Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall arrives in 2008 with no agenda beyond the placement of one naked man in a series of increasingly awkward rooms. Jason Segel wrote the script and plays Peter Bretter, a composer of television cues who is discarded by the title character and retreats to Oahu, where he promptly discovers his ex and her new boyfriend sharing the same resort. The film belongs to the Apatow school, which is to say it is preoccupied with humiliation, bodily function, and the slow rehabilitation of a sad man's ego. There is no thesis here. There is only Hawaii, and hurt feelings, and a puppet opera about Dracula.

The cast is white, the romance is heterosexual, and the politics are absent. The nudity in the opening scene is deployed for laughter, not for any statement about bodies or their acceptability. The island setting supplies sunsets and snorkeling and nothing resembling environmental concern. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned. The closest thing to a social idea involves Peter retrieving a topless photograph of Rachel from a bar's restroom collage without her consent having been sought, an act that reads as common decency and not as commentary. The film wants to be funny. It is frequently funny, which is its own small achievement and the whole of its ambition.

What remains is a well-made entertainment with a soft heart and no interest in instructing anyone. It won no major awards, spawned a spin-off about the rock star, and made a great deal of money. Future cultural historians will find in it a document of 2008's comic tastes, its improv-heavy rhythms, its willingness to let a man weep openly and then joke about it. They will find nothing else. This is a film that asks nothing of its audience except attention and a tolerance for prolonged male nudity. A clean slate, then. Rare, and almost restful.