From the poster, you might think “Our Idiot Brother” has all the elements for a great comedy -- Paul Rudd starring as a sweet, stoned doofus, opposite a cast of hilarious heavyweights like Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, Steve Coogan, Zooey Deschanel, Rashida Jones and Adam Scott.
But something went wrong along the way -- while the film does offer its share of zingy one-liners and entertaining character moments, the final result is a movie that can’t decide if it wants to be snarkily sweet or mean and misanthropic.
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And it’s the female characters, for the most part, that wind up being the object of the movie’s venom.
Rudd’s Ned is a holy idiot, floating through life on a cloud of naivete and pot smoke. His relatively carefree existence gets upended when he sells weed to a uniformed police officer -- the movie isn’t called “Our Idiot Brother” for nothing -- and when he gets out of jail, Ned’s girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn) has kicked him off of the upstate New York organic farm where he’s been living with her and, even more troubling to Ned, announces that she’s keeping Ned’s beloved dog Willie Nelson.
Ned tries moving back in with his boozy mom (Shirley Knight) on Long Island, but he eventually heads to Manhattan, where he crashes with each of his sisters, with disastrous results.
While staying with supermom Liz (Mortmer), Ned helps out on a documentary directed by her husband Dylan (Coogan) and realizes that Dylan’s having an affair; while hanging out with Vanity Fair reporter Miranda (Banks), he gets an aristocratic interview subject to open up about a past scandal, but then refuses to stand by the story when the ruthlessly ambitious Miranda tries to publish it; later, he blurts out the fact that untalented comedian Natalie (Deschanel) is pregnant, despite the fact that she’s supposed to be in a monogamous relationship with lawyer Cindy (Jones, as the least convincing butch lesbian in the history of cinema).
So basically, Ned may be a twit, but the real problem is that he’s so innocent, and his big mouth gets his sisters into trouble because he’s shattering the lies that they’ve all created about themselves. (Liz should let her son take karate, and Miranda shouldn’t try to work her way up the ladder on someone else’s misery, and blah blah blah already.)
And while there’s certainly a way to spin a modern “Candide” about a rube who disrupts the life of city folks and their duplicitous ways, “Our Idiot Brother” gives us a troika of irritating female characters who need their bumpkin brother to show up to fix their lives for them.
Toss in the shrewish and nasty Janet, and you’ve got a bubbling cauldron of misogyny -- in a movie that’s, incidentally, co-written by a woman.
