REVIEW: Paul Rudd Saves Our Idiot Brother from Total Idiocy

Jesse Peretz’s Our Idiot Brother is a feel-good movie for people who resist feel-good movies, a flawed vessel that nonetheless stays afloat by clinging to its buoyant star, Paul Rudd. Its problems are numerous and apparent: The picture meanders listlessly, and in the end it’s really more of a character sketch than a comedy — the movie’s writers, David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz (the director’s sister), haven’t really bothered much with a plot. Yet I came out of Our Idiot Brother feeling better than I did when I went in. It’s the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there’s something good-hearted about them. Paul Rudd plays Ned, the brother —though he’s not really an idiot — of the title. He’s one of those low-key, freewheeling guys who never seems to have an actual job: As the movie opens, he’s running an organic farm stand, and when a cop earnestly asks him if he’s got any pot to sell, Ned resists at first and then takes the cop at his word — upon which the bastard clamps a pair of handcuffs on him and hauls his affable dog, Willie Nelson, away in a separate car. Ned is perhaps too trusting to survive in the world, yet his guilelessness is simply part of his DNA: He expects the best of people, having found that to be the best way to get them to deliver it. But his insistence on being open to the universe exasperates his three sisters, particularly the oldest, Liz (Emily Mortimer), a quivery house-mouse type — Ned moves in with her to get himself together after his short jail stint. Liz has a son with a shithead documentary filmmaker (played, all too convincingly, by Steve Coogan). The kid, who suffers with the depressing name River (he’s played, with a blessed minimum of adorableness, by Matthew Mindler), wants to learn martial arts but instead gets dragged off to ballet class. Ned roughhouses with River and shows him Pink Panther movies, despite the fact that his parents frown on too much “screen media.” It’s easy to see that Ned’s influence is the one thing that might save the kid from being totally miserable. Slightly more tolerant are Ned’s other sisters, the half-ditzy, half-together Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), an entertainment journalist, and Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), an aspiring stand-up comic whose feet are feeling a little cold as she prepares to move in with her lawyer girlfriend (played by the effortlessly appealing Rashida Jones). Mother Shirley Knight looks on, dizzily, a glass of wine perched perpetually in her hand. Our Idiot Brother has no story line to speak of: It’s really just a rambling portrait of a mismatched family that’s functional only by the seat of its pants, largely thanks to the way Ned keeps everyone grounded by messing about in their business. Of course, the ending comes tied to a big, clunky epiphany: This idiot brother is actually a really nice guy! You can see that one coming like the Shrek balloon in the Macy’s parade. But Peretz — who previously directed the 2006 feature The Ex — gives Rudd plenty of latitude, allowing him to carry the picture, kayak-style, over its rougher patches. Rudd, with his catfishy facial hair and his Crocs, isn’t just a happy-go-lucky truth-teller, the kind of guy whose alleged generosity is really just a disguise for his own self-centeredness. And that’s the key to this character: Ned may upset his sisters’ lives with his navete and his unwanted advice, but Rudd knows better than to make Ned too cuddly. He never lets the character veer too far into adorable manchild territory. Somehow, there’s still an aura of masculinity about Ned — he’s not just some fantasy boyfriend for the Sleepytime Tea set. And any actor who can pull that off has got to know what he’s doing — especially if he’s wearing Crocs.