As the end of The Bubble (The bubble), a satire of the wonderful world of cinema, one of the characters declares: “If your film is shitty, it can be fine, as long as you have a good ending. Without being on a faecal level, far from it, the most recent comedy by one of the American specialists in the genre, Judd Apatow, itself has difficulty in applying this maxim.
The film is just… very ordinary, and arouses more indifference than laughter.
Camped in England, The Bubble recounts the nightmarish filming, in full pandemic confinement, of a Hollywood blockbuster inspired as much by the saga Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park) than from the Marvel universe. The title refers to the “bubble” in which the film crew is confined, a vast country mansion converted into a hotel located not far from the studio where the film is shot, the sixth in a series increasingly preposterous.
The plot is mainly tied to the point of view of Carol (Karen Gillan, efficient), an actress who refused to play in the previous opus, but who was forced to return for lack of success elsewhere. Also in the credits: an actor addicted to sex, a star neophyte actress of TikTok, an actor who has just published a bestseller of personal growth, two exes who love and hate each other to the core of the day, a director who thinks he’s the next Steven Soderbergh, a deceitful producer, and plenty of “normal” peripheral characters isolated with these chronic narcissists.
With such a context, a cast as solid as it is varied, and knowing that Hollywood is capable of wonders of self-mockery when it decides to look at itself in a magnifying mirror, there was plenty to laugh about. Especially since Judd Apatow co-wrote the screenplay with Pam Brady, collaborator on South Park. Alas, the film never really takes off: it has no momentum.
We are actually witnessing a succession of poorly assembled episodes in a disjointed story recounting the descent into hell of the production and the growing revolt of the performers.
One side borrowed
Like the film in the film, without however the parallel working in its favor, The Bubble quickly becomes chaotic. Some jokes sometimes take on an “insider” dimension; it’s not that we struggle to understand them, but rather to grasp their comic value. As if the screenwriters were too, yes, in their bubble.
There are a few good jokes, especially the Zoom-like exchanges between a sociopathic studio manager (Kate McKinnon, hilarious) and the increasingly desperate producer, but other jokes, like the fact that these blockbusters are now almost exclusively shot in front of huge green screens, are repeated until they wear out.
In fact, it often feels like Judd Apatow is out of his humorous element. Perhaps the British context has something to do with it, but it seems that the director of The 40 Year-Old Virgin (40 years old and still a virgin), Trainwreck (Desperate case) and The King of Staten Island tried in vain to make an Armando Iannucci-style satire, behind the brilliants In the Loop and The Death of Stalin (Stalin’s death), replacing the political class with the film industry.
From where, undoubtedly, this borrowed side for which the cinema of Apatow is familiar. We feel at times the dawning ambition of a subject, but the film is more messy than deep.
Faced with such an observation, one can wonder if it would not have been better for The Bubble to be crappy, some films being so bad that they become good. At the risk of “going crazy” with the filmmaker’s admirers, we can’t even say that The Bubble reached that level.