The brother’s dim in this amusing movie starring Paul Rudd.
Behold “Our Idiot Brother” Ned (Paul Rudd). Mild as milk, loyal as a Labrador, soft as hummus, he is so gullible that even his friends in the crunchy Catskills think he’s a hopeless boob. Especially when a uniformed police officer begs him for some weed while he’s selling organic vegetables — and he gives him some.
Ned’s problem is not that he’s an idiot, but that he’s too trusting. We see him sitting on a subway train with a wad of cash. “Hold this,” he says to the stranger sitting next to him as he deals with a beverage spill. But the guy sitting next to him is so surprised that he gives the money back when asked.
Which is exactly what would actually happen in New York City, or so I’d like to think. Such cute moments are the heart and soul of this tepid but lovable comedy in which Ned, after a prison stretch for the drug sale, is forced to rely on the kindness of his mother and three sisters. Each gets exasperated and passes him along to the next one.
With Liz (Emily Mortimer), a married earth mama whose kids are called Echo and River, Ned accidentally unleashes the son’s inner Kung Fu Panda in a house that’s so anti-violence (and humorless) that no one’s ever heard of the Pink Panther movies. Also, Ned accidentally discovers Liz’s snooty documentary filmmaker husband Dylan (Steve Coogan) is having an affair.
Similar mishaps await when Ned tries sponging off Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), a Vanity Fair journalist, and Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), a bisexual would-be standup comic and artist’s model. In all cases, Ned’s serene clarity and openness cause awkward moments of truth for people who would rather be deceived.
“Our Idiot Brother” takes delicate swats at some low-hanging fruit. Ned’s ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) is one of those unbearable crusties who farms her own produce, professes pacifism and says, when one of his sisters threatens to punch her, “I’m not gonna receive that with anything but love.” A self-help/mind control cult bills itself as offering a “sustainable upgrade,” which is a fairly perfect combination buzzword for 2011. The filmmakers have looked carefully around them and declared the world to be droll.
This is not a bad strategy for dealing with existence, and the film goes far on its good nature, though it is never more than gently funny. Any movie that asks us to sympathize with a beautiful journalist because she may not get sufficiently juicy quotes for her magazine is aimed only at a certain audience.
“Our Idiot Brother,” which is directed by Jesse Peretz (son of the longtime owner of the New Republic) and co-written by his sister Evgenia (who works for Vanity Fair), suffers slightly from the myopia of the urban creative mafia. Such is the Peretz-eye view of reality that when Ned goes to prison — twice — it is merely a relaxing lark, whereas Miranda’s meeting with a demanding fact checker is (meant to be) nerve-jangling.
Characters flit through coffee bars and ice cream shops, laze on trampolines, attend cocktail parties, sketch each other in spacious lofts. The Neds of this world are disappointments because they’d rather play around with biodynamic farming than take their rightful places as princes of the media-cultural complex, but outsiders may chafe at the way birthright privileges are taken for granted. Money is so distant a concern that Miranda hands Ned $300 as though it’s a Tic Tac.
So this bourgeois-bohemian movie is, in a way, as serene in its obliviousness to the exterior world as its man-child subject. It’s not essential, but it is endearing.