Ratings
The Daily: 2.5 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 73%
More on 'Our Idiot Brother'
IMDB
Are there people in this world as uncomplicatedly kind as Ned, the lead character of director Jesse Peretz’s “Our Idiot Brother”? Ned, as played by Paul Rudd, is an angel in a snowflake sweater and pink Crocs, long brown locks blowing in the breeze of life. He’d be a slacker if he weren’t working so hard to be good — to his dog, Willie Nelson; to his fellow travelers at the farm where he works; and to the local uniformed police officer to whom Ned sells weed, an act of charity that lands him in prison.
There Ned wins “most cooperative inmate” four months running, but emerges to find that his girlfriend has moved on, taking up with a chubbier, even more laid back version of himself. Exiled from his upstate idyll, he heads back to the big city to blissfully surf the couches of his three sisters — Liz (Emily Mortimer), a timid mother busy making her son’s life miserable with TV-denial, African dance classes, and a strictly limited sugar intake; Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), a predatory Vanity Fair writer with a fondness for high heels and New York’s tonier corners; and Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), a flaky lesbian and part-time standup comedian living with more roommates than she can keep track of.
Like Ned, equipped with an uncanny ability to gently identify hypocrisy whenever he sees it, the three women are as much screenwriter archetypes as they are real people. Liz’s husband, a documentary filmmaker (Steve Coogan) who nevertheless rants about how “this country is obsessed with screens” and coaches his child to be “enigmatic, erudite, wise, incandescent” in a primary school interview, is a philandering creep. Miranda, finally given a chance to profile “an actual person, not just a moisturizer,” proceeds to violate almost every rule of journalism in pursuit of the story. And Natalie is exposed, in her woozy lifestyle and relationship with long-term girlfriend Cindy (Rashida Jones), as suggestible to just about anything, including promiscuity and betrayal.
Ned can’t help but tell the truth and so does, guilelessly betraying each sister’s confidences in turn. But Peretz’s movie — made from a screenplay written by his sister, Evgenia Peretz, and her husband David Schisgall — is firmly on Ned’s side, opposing his dreamy, oblivious honesty with his sisters’ habitual self-deceptions. Why exposing his own family members’ most closely held secrets in front of everyone is supposed to be a more fundamentally moral stance than loyally keeping those secrets, the film never explains.
Liz is mercilessly lampooned for her liberal pieties, with her son’s doleful shehnai (an Indian oboe thought to charm private school administrators) lessons played for laughs. Meanwhile Ned’s swift destruction of her marriage — he wanders in on Coogan’s Dylan “interviewing” one of his female subjects in the nude — is treated like a good deed.
This belief, that intentions somehow matter more than the result of those intentions, is another kind of liberal hypocrisy, of course, albeit an unacknowledged one. Like last year’s Oscar-baiting “The Kids Are All Right,” “Our Idiot Brother” sets out to satirize a mildly unconventional family’s false view of itself and in the process commits the same sins — if you can call lacking self-awareness a sin, anyway. Only in the movies is it so catastrophic to lie to oneself and one’s family every once in a while.
Rudd plays Ned as oblivious, sweet, and bumbling, and one of the pleasures of the film is watching him discover kindred spirits in unlikely places. His comedic chemistry with Adam Scott in particular, here playing Miranda’s layabout sci-fi writer neighbor Jeremy, lingers long after the moral “lessons” of the film have faded. Jeremy lacks ambition, courage, and a steady job and hence Miranda treats him like an aberrant failure. But he and Ned share more than this movie would like to admit.
The Daily: 2.5 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 73%
More on 'Our Idiot Brother'
IMDB
Are there people in this world as uncomplicatedly kind as Ned, the lead character of director Jesse Peretz’s “Our Idiot Brother”? Ned, as played by Paul Rudd, is an angel in a snowflake sweater and pink Crocs, long brown locks blowing in the breeze of life. He’d be a slacker if he weren’t working so hard to be good — to his dog, Willie Nelson; to his fellow travelers at the farm where he works; and to the local uniformed police officer to whom Ned sells weed, an act of charity that lands him in prison.
There Ned wins “most cooperative inmate” four months running, but emerges to find that his girlfriend has moved on, taking up with a chubbier, even more laid back version of himself. Exiled from his upstate idyll, he heads back to the big city to blissfully surf the couches of his three sisters — Liz (Emily Mortimer), a timid mother busy making her son’s life miserable with TV-denial, African dance classes, and a strictly limited sugar intake; Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), a predatory Vanity Fair writer with a fondness for high heels and New York’s tonier corners; and Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), a flaky lesbian and part-time standup comedian living with more roommates than she can keep track of.
Like Ned, equipped with an uncanny ability to gently identify hypocrisy whenever he sees it, the three women are as much screenwriter archetypes as they are real people. Liz’s husband, a documentary filmmaker (Steve Coogan) who nevertheless rants about how “this country is obsessed with screens” and coaches his child to be “enigmatic, erudite, wise, incandescent” in a primary school interview, is a philandering creep. Miranda, finally given a chance to profile “an actual person, not just a moisturizer,” proceeds to violate almost every rule of journalism in pursuit of the story. And Natalie is exposed, in her woozy lifestyle and relationship with long-term girlfriend Cindy (Rashida Jones), as suggestible to just about anything, including promiscuity and betrayal.
Ned can’t help but tell the truth and so does, guilelessly betraying each sister’s confidences in turn. But Peretz’s movie — made from a screenplay written by his sister, Evgenia Peretz, and her husband David Schisgall — is firmly on Ned’s side, opposing his dreamy, oblivious honesty with his sisters’ habitual self-deceptions. Why exposing his own family members’ most closely held secrets in front of everyone is supposed to be a more fundamentally moral stance than loyally keeping those secrets, the film never explains.
Liz is mercilessly lampooned for her liberal pieties, with her son’s doleful shehnai (an Indian oboe thought to charm private school administrators) lessons played for laughs. Meanwhile Ned’s swift destruction of her marriage — he wanders in on Coogan’s Dylan “interviewing” one of his female subjects in the nude — is treated like a good deed.
This belief, that intentions somehow matter more than the result of those intentions, is another kind of liberal hypocrisy, of course, albeit an unacknowledged one. Like last year’s Oscar-baiting “The Kids Are All Right,” “Our Idiot Brother” sets out to satirize a mildly unconventional family’s false view of itself and in the process commits the same sins — if you can call lacking self-awareness a sin, anyway. Only in the movies is it so catastrophic to lie to oneself and one’s family every once in a while.
Rudd plays Ned as oblivious, sweet, and bumbling, and one of the pleasures of the film is watching him discover kindred spirits in unlikely places. His comedic chemistry with Adam Scott in particular, here playing Miranda’s layabout sci-fi writer neighbor Jeremy, lingers long after the moral “lessons” of the film have faded. Jeremy lacks ambition, courage, and a steady job and hence Miranda treats him like an aberrant failure. But he and Ned share more than this movie would like to admit.
