Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
1. The word "sitcom" is often used as a pejorative to describe bad films -- "the plot is pitched at the sitcom level" -- as if the sitcom were some sort of minstrel bottom rung of entertainment, as if every sitcom were mass produced with a minimum of thought, effort or design, as if sitcoms were basically the creative equivalent of an iPhone app that makes fart noises. But the best sitcoms aren't like that at all. When I watch "30 Rock," or "Louie," or -- perhaps most relevant to this conversation -- "Parks and Recreation," I see a level of intelligent, well-observed comedy that puts even some of the more lauded cinematic comedies to shame. The 10 most successful movie comedies this year so far include "The Hangover Part II," "Horrible Bosses," "Just Go With It," "Bad Teacher" and "Zookeeper." For this, we consider movies some sort of higher class of comedy? It'd be more accurate to criticize bad sitcoms by calling them "big-screen humor."
2. I bring all this up because "Our Idiot Brother" is a would-be comedy that can only dream of reaching the level of a "Parks and Recreation," a fact that's made even more obvious because it features two actors from that show (Adam Scott and Rashida Jones) who seem beamed in from a different, smarter movie. "Our Idiot Brother" wants to be an of-the-moment indie comedy version of a family drama, but it doesn't have the courage of conviction to make any one of its main characters anything other than a walking cliche. These are cardboard cutouts of quirk that I'd refer to as sitcom ... if I were being as lazy as the filmmakers.
3. Paul Rudd, in one of his typically cheery, likable performances that don't have much meat to them (I love the guy, but he's turning into a throw pillow; it's unbelievable this guy once was the lead of a Neil LaBute film), plays Ned, a stoner layabout who, when we first meet him, is selling marijuana to a uniformed policeman. (Ned's just trying to make the guy not feel so sad.) He's the eponymous sibling of three female New York stereotypes: Miranda (Elizabeth Banks) is the hard-bitten careerist gossip reporter; Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) is the free-spirited kinda-lesbian; Liz (Emily Mortimer) is the sexually repressed Brooklyn mommy whose husband (an embarrassingly wasted Steve Coogan) is cheating on her. Ned floats in and out of their lives, always just trying to help but finding himself in all sorts of wacky shenanigans and misunderstandings that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of "Three's Company." The movie is oddly shiftless, lacking even the most basic momentum; whenever Ned shows up to visit one of his sisters, it'll take you a second to remember what was going on with their story when we saw them last, if anything.
4. One of the central problems with "Our Idiot Brother" is that it never quite decides whether or not Ned is truly stupid; it just sort of moves his IQ up and down according to the conveniences of the plot. (He gets everyone into messy situations that he later ends up explaining the true perspective on.) But the film leaves no doubt that we all Need A Little Ned In Our Lives; everyone else in the film is a self-centered jerk, and only through Ned's "whatever, man" simplicity can we appreciate what happiness is. Or something. The whole film's ethos is also as "indie" as a Taylor Swift song: Everyone ultimately just needs to learn To Love Yourself. If you take away the weed jokes -- and honestly, is it funny that a dog is named "Willie Nelson?" Seriously, is it? I don't get it -- and the male nudity and jokes about Brooklyn preschools, you essentially have a particularly treacly Hallmark card.
5. Rudd's performance has a sort of silly purity to it; Ned's supposed to be unaware of most of what's going on around him, and Rudd's skilled at making us like him and care about him anyway. And he has some fun moments with Scott (whose character makes no sense and, I suspect, has huge swaths of scenes on the cutting-room floor) and, particularly, Jones, who is a warm, welcome presence even though no one told the film's costume department that lesbians do not dress like circus clowns. But this a biteless, blandly conventional comedy that doesn't for one moment ask anything more of its audience to do anything more than float harmlessly along. That might work for a main character, but it doesn't do the rest of us much good. "Our Idiot Brother" makes you want to go home and turn on your television.
Grade: C
