Our Idiot Brother

Is there anything worse than seeing a talented cast stuck in a movie that doesn't let them truly work with the material? Our Idiot Brother is one such movie. It's the kind of movie where we see the names in the cast flashed during the opening credits, and expect great things. The movie starts out slow, so we wait for things to pick up, and for the cast to truly break out and entertain us. But the movie never picks up, and the cast never does. It's infuriating, for sure. And although the movie has some nice moments, we just can't get over how halfhearted the whole thing seems.

The movie stars Paul Rudd as Ned, the "Idiot Brother" of the title. He's nice to a fault, extremely naive and trusting, good natured, prone to blurting out peoples' embarrassing secrets at the wrong time, and the one true love in his life is his pet dog named Willy Nelson. As the film opens, he's thrown in prison for a short while after he tries to sell a bag of weed to a uniformed cop. He's released early ("I was named 'model prisoner' four months in a row", he boasts), and heads back to the farm where his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) lives, only to find that she has moved on, and refuses to let him move back in. What's worse, she has his precious dog, and won't let it go. With nowhere else to go, he must move in with his three individual sisters - Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), and Liz (Emily Mortimer). One by one, he destroys his sisters' lives and relationships with his blunt honesty, and inability to keep his mouth closed about things like infidelity and a hidden pregnancy. Of course, he means well, and does his best to fix what he destroys. But his main goal is to get his beloved Willy Nelson back, and live happily on his own.

Despite the film's R-rating, this is a gentle and a little too lazy comedy that, much like the character of Ned, is a bit too nice to a fault. We keep on waiting for some kind of edge or for a big laugh, but it never comes. We laugh politely from time to time at some of Ned's misunderstandings, but for the most part, this is an overly safe and lethargic comedy that just constantly seems to be stuck in the slow lane, like it's afraid to really fly with its premise and cast. Maybe the joke is that Ned is such a nice guy, and he's surrounded by such terrible people. His sisters are all more than a little bitter toward him, even before he starts destroying their lives. But, much like a sitcom, Our Idiot Brother is fond of tidy solutions to all of its problems, and Ned is able to make everyone around him be a little nicer just by being his pleasant self.

There are moments where the movie seems to want to be taken seriously, and these work just about as well as the comic moments, because we don't care about the characters. When one of the sisters discovers from Ned that her husband (Steve Coogan) has been having an affair on his job, there is absolutely no tension created, not even when she confronts her husband in the bedroom. There's no sense of betrayal, no sense of love lost, and no sense of pain. The actors are just reciting a scene, and we're just waiting for the film to move on to the next scene. This is a muted movie in just about every way. The laughs are near non-existent, the drama is thin and unconvincing, and the pace is so glacial, it seems to be at a stand-still at times.

What's frustrating is that I have no doubt that with a different screenplay or approach, this cast could have really made this material into something to watch. But, much like the film itself, the actors seem muted, and are never allowed to be as funny as we know they can be. Oh, there are certainly laughs to be had, but they are sparse and not big, full ones. We watch the actors up on the screen, and remember how funny they can be, and have been in other films. That leads us to wonder what they saw in this project. I have no doubt that the actors will get a chance to be funny again, but here, they're listless in a particularly lifeless little movie.

I kind of hate to say such things about Our Idiot Brother, because the idea is workable, the cast is strong, and you really want the thing to come together while you're watching it. But, I can't sugar coat it - I just didn't laugh all that much. There are some sweet moments, and a couple scenes that I liked, but overall, I think I'll be hard pressed to remember anything about this one a month from now.

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