Our Idiot Brother: The Dreadful Sound of the Painfully Unfunny

Director Jesse Peretz (The Ex) manages to cage audiences for all 90 excruciating minutes of this comedy that never quite connects.  Even with a remarkable cast, the concept of this film is far from funny and the plot ultimately causes more irritation than laughs.

Premise: A naive man-boy causes ripples in his family’s lives after he is forced to live with each of them.  Result: A generally unfunny, often cringe-inducing spectacle that manages to neutralize the good performances of its strong cast and make this difficult to stomach in almost every way.

The film opens with Ned (Paul Rudd) doing the unthinkable: with only minor coaxing, he manages to sell pot to a uniformed police officer.  It is therefore only within moments that the film establishes its fundamental premise: that Ned is an idiot; a painfully stupid person who manages to fall into every one of life’s little traps.

However, the flaw in this construct is that the film does not seem to understand the difference between being stupid and being naïve.  Often Ned is positioned as that adorable boy next door filled with hope and trust, just the formula we should in mix our lives with.  But even small children tend to understand what Ned cannot, that trust is a gift earned, not granted, and instead he just ends up causing continuous, painful calamity with everything he touches.

After several months, Ned emerges from prison none the wiser, and finds that his evil, hippy girlfriend, Janet (Kathryn Hahn), has replaced him with another stoned nincompoop, Billy (T.J. Miller). While these scenes do bring about a few broken smiles, overall, the hippy humor is from somewhere deep in space and like light from a far off star, it will take thousands of years to make an impact here on Earth.  While waiting, audiences may find distraction by trying to count the number of times Ned can shout of “Willie Nelson” the name of his dog, a storyline that receives inexplicable attention.

And so, with no place to stay, Ned returns to his mother’s home and communes with his three dysfunctional sisters, each of whom represent a different, yet equally sad female stereotype.  His mother Ilene (Shirley Knight) appears to be some type of functional alcoholic; his eldest sister Liz (Emily Mortimer), is some type of broken housewife too blind to see her husband’s affair (and that he is a di%k); his next sister, Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), a blossoming young journalist in NYC who is neurotic enough to destabilize atomic compounds; and finally Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), the sexually liberated but thoroughly confused youngest sister who manages to often come up as more clueless than her brother, the aforementioned idiot.

Ned descends upon them like a hurricane of honesty, destroying everything in his path.  As the film progresses, Ned manages to inadvertently do everything possible to destabilize his sisters in his never-ending quest to make enough money to rent the goat barn behind his ex-girlfriend’s farm (dare to dream there Ned!)  Of course, because he is cute and cuddly, all his actions and their consequences only serve to point out just how remarkably troubling his family’s lives really are.

In record time, he is able to pull apart Liz’s marriage, possibly destroy Miranda’s career, threaten Nat’s relationship and land himself back in jail by telling his parole officer he had been smoking pot.  But like the unity that comes in a great storm’s aftermath, audiences are asked to understand that despite what seems like chaos, Ned’s antics have actually made their lives better by confronting the troubles they had previously refused to see. And naturally, in a world of trust and love, everything work out for the best. J Unfortunately, if asked, most survivors of catastrophe might point out they’d been better off if it hadn’t happened to them at all.

Unfortunately, the clichéd underlying premise and a generally unfunny, and often painfully awkward, plot will likely leave audiences wanting less. While Rudd and the rest of the cast do a good job in their roles and create relatively nuanced characters, the film fails to take hold in most important ways.  Instead, we are left with a film that wasn’t bad, but in the end, was much closer to stupid than it would have liked.

Rating: 5 – A luke-warm Pinot Grigio