Our Idiot Brother

A stoner, or in academia, a habitual user of cannabis, can be funny. Dumb people can be funny. Dysfunctional families can be funny. People being hurt, or naked, or both, can be funny. "Our Idiot Brother" has all of these situations, but "Our Idiot Brother" is not funny. It has its moments, and certain characters work better than others, but ultimately, it's a big disappointment.

Paul Rudd plays Ned, an honest and benevolent, well, idiot, who works at an organic farm. He's so idiotic that he is arrested for selling marijuana to a police officer (if you find the joke funny, you won't for very long, because it's repeated over and over again throughout the film). He's released only to find that his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) has thrown him out and is keeping his dog, named Willie Nelson (another joke that is repeated constantly). He moves home and shifts from home to home of his three sisters: Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), a stand-up comedienne in a happy relationship with Cindy (Rashida Jones); Miranda, (Elizabeth Banks) who writes for Vanity Fair and is desperate to write the perfect tell-all story; and Liz, (Emily Mortimer) who is married to a documentary filmmaker (Steve Coogan), who is cheating on her with his documentary subject. They all lead seemingly perfect lives until Ned shows up, and his honesty brings them down to reality.

Unfortunately, "Our Idiot Brother" falls flat. I can't fault Paul Rudd for being a bad actor--he looks and acts the part convincingly--but I can fault him for being unfunny, which he is throughout most of the film. He's likable, no doubt, and as a matter a fact, all of the actresses--Deschandel, Mortimer, Banks, Jones--are likable as well, but none of them are funny either. Likability does not equal humorous. It's remarkable instead that the really unlikable character (Coogan's) is the funniest. And other than Coogan, T.J. Miller as another stoner provides the only other real laughs.

Some of the jokes are terribly unoriginal or predictable. When Coogan walks around naked after being confronted by Ned, there's a shot that's so obviously copied from Kevin Smith's "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" that Smith could easily win if he were to sue. The side story of Deschandel and Jones is basically a cheap rip off of last year's "The Kids Are All Right." In this film, however, they add the unfortunate and too-often-used stereotype that bisexual people are promiscuous, confused, and/or untruthful.

One of my biggest problems is the way the film relies on words to try and tap into the humor. That is, the jokes probably have the potential to be funny, but they are delivered in a way that is quite unfunny. So the actors, with or without the advice of the director and screenwriters, add in a bunch of words that either aren't funny to begin with or simply highlight how unfunny the joke is. For example, it's rarely funny to hear a child in a film swear, but here we get to hear a child swear. (The young actor Matthew Mindler does do a good job; if the film had more Coogan, Miller, and Mindler and less of the other actors I think I would have enjoyed it more).

The film has all sorts of references to Peter Sellers, but that only made me think of the Peter Sellers films they're referencing about clumsy men ruining situations, like in "A Shot in the Dark" and "Being There." "Our Idiot Brother" has none of that humor or sophomoric sophistication of Sellers films. Instead, it repeats the same jokes over and over again or it simply steals them from other films.