OUR IDIOT BROTHER
Directed by: Jesse Peretz
Written by: Evgenia Peretz, David Shisgall
Starring: Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, Zooey Deschanel, Steve Coogan, Adam Scott
Over the last decade, Paul Rudd has carved out an increasingly successful career as a straight man in a series of comedies. Rudd’s success can be traced to a combination of his genial, amiable, likeable persona and his mastery of the reaction shot/double-take. Straight-man roles tend to be overlooked, but they’re no less necessary to the comedic form. In OUR IDIOT BROTHER (formerly MY IDIOT BROTHER), directed by Jesse Peretz (THE EX) from a script written by his sister, Evgenia Peretz, and David Schisgall, Evgenia’s husband and writing partner, Rudd temporarily sets aside the straight-man persona for a Dude-like (as in THE BIG LEBOWSKI’s Dude) stoner-slacker-organic farmer, willfully self-delusional “holy fool,” and all-around chaos catalyst. It’s one of Rudd’s better roles, albeit one that’s shorter on laughs than the advertising campaign suggests.
When we first meet Ned (Rudd), he’s selling organic produce at a farmer’s market in upstate New York. An effusive, friendly police officer convinces the naïve Ned to sell him some pot, ostensibly to de-stress, but really to entrap Ned into a drug bust. Despite a major setback that makes Ned a felon and parolee (after eight months in prison), a no-ex-girlfriend, Janet (Kathryn Hahn), who evicts Ned from the organic farm, Ned refuses to change his ultra-positive outlook. That still leaves him, however, without a means of income and a place to crash for the foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future. Enter Ned’s three sisters, Liz (Emily Mortimer), a housewife and mother, Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), an ambitious writer for Vanity Fair, and Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), a bohemian and/or performance artist. Into each sister’s life, Ned enters, wreaking havoc of minor, but no less (personally) important, proportions.
Ned first ends up couch-surfing with Liz. Married to Dylan (Steve Coogan), a documentary filmmaker, and the mother of two children, including an infant, Liz allows Ned to stay with her purely out of obligation. Ned’s child-like behavior ingratiates him with Liz’s 9-year-old son, but has the opposite effect on Dylan who, probably rightly, sees Ned as a nuisance, an intruder on his semi-happy life. Still, Dylan gives Ned a job doing odd jobs on his documentary. Ned’s foray into documentary filmmaking proves to be short-lived, leading him to move in with Miranda and helping her on her latest assignment and potential big break, a story on a visiting Brit aristocrat, Lady Arabella (Janet Montgomery), with a semi-scandalous personal life. She also can’t bring herself to admit her feelings for her upstairs neighbor, Jeremy (Adam Scott), an unpublished science-fiction writer. Ned ultimately ends up staying with Natalie, a bisexual thirty-something with commitment issues: She’s hesitant to take the next, big step, moving out of an artists’ loft she shares with several roommates and moving in with her longtime girlfriend, Cindy (Rashida Jones), an attorney.
Peretz and his screenwriting partners modeled Ned on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s title character, THE IDIOT, an aristocratic prince, and Luis Buñuel’s NAZARIN, a Roman Catholic priest. In both Dostoevsky’s novel and Bunuel’s film (itself based on Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós’ late 19th-century novel), the title character tries to lead a life modeled on Jesus Christ, a life guided by openness, trust, compassion, and honesty. In each, the central character’s choices inevitably lead to ruin, if not for the title character, then for the other characters, some well meaning, some searching for guidance or a higher purpose, who inadvertently enter his orbit, with one, key difference: for all of OUR IDIOT BROTHER’s scenes of discomfort and abnegation, it’s first and last a comedy, not a tragedy (as both Dostoevsky’s novel and Buñuel’s ultimately are).
OUR IDIOT BROTHER mixes the occasional low-brow joke with light, verbal humor and social satire. Peretz and his collaborators aim that satire primarily at Ned’s sisters, but also, to some extent, to Ned’s hippie lifestyle and choices. While that satire is often on the mark, it’s also over-obvious, dependent on caricatures rather than fully rounded characters. OUR IDIOT BROTHER, however, turns on Ned’s role as catalyst for change in his sister’s lives. As a “fool” or “idiot,” Ned doesn’t change significantly, gaining a barely perceptible awareness that his life philosophy may have unintended, negative consequences for his sisters. Ultimately, Ned remains the stoner-hippie with too much love for the world and not enough common sense (for himself) that we met in the first scene.
