OUR IDIOT BROTHER Review

While it's brewing with local farming, backyard chicken coops, mangy individuals, babies in slings, and parents of young children with hyper-aversions to "screens" and anything resembling violence, I can't say that "Our Idiot Brother" reflects the life I married into - but it certainly seems to be echoing it. The initial world of the movie may seem exotic and "other" to many, including many of the film's more traditional characters, but to its credit, the film doesn't judge any of it, rather opting to present it as ordinary as I personally know these things to be. None of this makes "Our Idiot Brother" a necessarily better or worse film, but it does help to set it apart. And although thoroughly likable, it needs all the help in the setting-apart department that it can get.

"Our Idiot Brother" is a perfectly serviceable, if also generally forgettable comedy starring the always-likable Paul Rudd as the affable title character. Utterly modest in intent and scope, the film is as good-natured as Rudd's shaggy-haired wayward would-be hippie. The title "Our Idiot Brother" is misleading, as it seems to be presenting another dumb guy comedy, when in reality, Rudd's character is not so much a dumb guy as he is terminally well meaning.

Rudd plays Ned, who immediately in the film is arrested for selling pot to a uniformed cop at a local farmer's market. As his parole officer later points out, this is a "retarded" move, but for Ned, it is one rooted in empathy - so much so, that although Ned has unquestionably screwed up from a legal standpoint, entrapment should be the operative word in that scenario.

Ned has three grown sisters, each of them content in their more traditional if also initially invisible precarious life situations. It's Ned, and his terminal shlubby honesty, that inadvertently ends up exposing and exploiting the precariousness of their situations. Elizabeth Banks is Miranda, an aspiring journalist who can't seem to get the necessary dirt on her assigned celebrity subject. Zooey Deschanel is Natalie, an avowed lesbian in a committed relationship, but with a wandering eye for whomever, regardless of gender. Emily Mortimer is Liz, a firmly rooted if overprotective wife and mother prone to extreme flakiness. Subsequently, while the film tells us that women are prone to living their lives as overly strategized house-of-cards dramas, men are simpletons who are at best content to optimistic drifting, at worst self-serving automatons (see Steve Coogan's husband character). In diametric opposition to the lives of his sisters, Rudd's Ned only wants one thing in life: his big red dog Willie Nelson (who is being withheld from him by an overly-controlling former lover.).

Despite these observations, "Our Idiot Brother" has no intentions of any such statements. It's a character-driven comedy that while lacking any real laughs wallows in shallow pathos. This not a bad movie, gaining a few points in my book for not falling into the modern comedy traps of gross-out gags and Judd Apatow's chronic tendency to overstay (the film's running time is a cozy ninety minutes). The ensemble cast delivers while not having to do any heavy lifting (except of course for the scene where two characters carry furniture up a staircase). The ending is too tidy and pat, but that too is not a surprise.

"Our Idiot Brother" pretty much does what it sets out to do. It doesn't aim to set the world on fire, and it doesn't. Just as we watch Ned finding himself free of his world (local farming and backyard chickens) for ninety minutes before more or less seeing him end up back in that spot (spoiler alert?) - just as I did, following the screening - so too will the audience for "Our Idiot Brother".

- Jim Tudor