Even Helen Mirren can’t save this. (Barry Wetcher)
Attempting to fill Dudley Moore’s top hat in “Arthur,” Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from “unfunny” to “irritating” to “vulgar” to the bottom one — “Andy Dick.”
Moore, Oscar-nominated in the 1981 classic, was Paddington Bear with a martini glass. Brand plays the alcoholic manboy zillionaire Arthur Bach with all of the exhausting vigor of those improv comics who turn every prop that crosses their field of vision into an excruciating “bit.” (Hey, a tea bag! Let’s riff!) If you were at a dinner party with Brand’s Arthur, your lips would hurt from pretending to smile while thinking (as in the worst Robin Williams movies), “Does this guy have an off switch?”
Arthur is a lost little rich boy whose only friend is his nanny, Hobson (an admirable but not especially funny Helen Mirren, in the part that won John Gielgud his Oscar). He is under pressure to marry a high-strung corporate social climber (Jennifer Garner) or be disinherited. As the wedding preparations proceed, he’s smitten by a proletarian Queens girl (the delicate and luminous Greta Gerwig, who seems about as working-class as Gwyneth Paltrow). Their meet-cute is a painfully contrived scene in which she is nearly arrested for, um, illegally conducting a walking tour of Grand Central Terminal.
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The one aspect of the remake that’s more creative than the original is this: The script puts a lot of energy into thinking about how to spend. In the original, Arthur was bored by his loot. This film is feverish about it. Arthur shuts down Grand Central for an hour and orders a carpet of rose petals and twirling acrobats for his big first date with Naomi (Gerwig).
Gerwig (so endearing in “Greenberg”) is an actress who glows with genuineness. She’s an indie angel, the last girl you’d expect to fall for this tasteless “Pretty Woman” glitz-worship. When she shows him the whispering corners in Grand Central that charmed generations of canoodlers, he says nothing romantic. He wants to buy them. Arthur is the CEO of Missing the Point, Inc., and a tender children’s book author like Naomi would be the first, not last, to notice.
The TV-trained director Jason Winer, of “Modern Family,” forgets that movies don’t have to blare their points as there is less danger you’ll wander off to the fridge. So we get several instances of Arthur misting up; get me some black velvet to set off this sad clown. “Check it out—this is poignant!” is the message of a death scene replacing the stark empty bed of the original. Instead of wit and heart, we get aggressively stupid slapstick: The shrill and dreary Garner, in a metal bustier, gets stuck to the bottom of a magnetic bed.
Arthur, dressed as Batman, zooms his Batmobile underneath the Wall Street bull statue solely to set up a shot with Brand posed beneath giant bronze testicles. Any film studio but one would have found itself heartily sued by Warner Bros. for such misuse of the Batman iconography. But alas, there’s no law against Warners (which is releasing “Arthur”) embarrassing itself.
Mirren, being Mirren, maintains her icy poise, but there is no excuse for putting her in a Darth Vader mask and having her say rude things. Nor should we be invited to contemplate the idea of Brand gnawing at her breasts (“I had to dab Tabasco on my nipples,” she says).
Remaking “Arthur” wasn’t automatically a bad idea, and some of the dialogue in the almost completely rewritten script might be funny from someone mugging half as much as Brand. Unable to relax, Brand is unable to charm. Without coming near a ukulele, he manages to be as odious as his doppelganger, the ‘60s novelty singer Tiny Tim.
kyle.smith@nypost.com