Oh, Brother

The issue of "depressing movies" sometimes makes me question the efficacy of cinema. I've noticed that I'm never at all disheartened by movies that intend to dishearten, whether by grisly violence, domestic misery, or philosophical pessimism. Often, the movie is lousy, so my impassivity is reasonable: Why should I be affected by something as lousy as The Pianist or Dogville? The strange thing is that, even when a filmmaker at the top of his game undertakes to devastate me, he fails; in the case of Crimes and Misdemeanors or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, I was merely pleased to have seen a good movie. I don't think I am a particularly detached filmgoer. I audibly gasp when something surprises me; I laugh when something is funny; I gnaw on my hand when things get tense. Yet I remain unscathed by every director who has set out to inflict despair upon his audience.

The problem, I think, is that such directors take the wrong route. They make movies about war, cancer, and drug addiction. They should make light-hearted comedies.

Case in point: Step Brothers, Will Ferrell's latest romp through preadolescence. It's not very good, but it's not especially terrible; it has a few laughs, and it looks like everyone had a great deal of fun making it. So why did despondency overtake me soon after I'd watched it? What strange doom lies here that is absent in Monster and Requiem for a Dream?

Step Brothers, whose title should be a single word, concerns two men, Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (John C. Reilly), who, at 39 and 40, still live at home, avoiding work and subsisting on delivered pizzas and microwaved nachos. Then Dale's father (Richard Jenkins) marries Brennan's mother (Mary Steenburgen), and the boys find themselves rooming together. At first, they can't stand each other, but they bond over their mutual hatred for Brennan's younger brother, Derek (Adam Scott), and soon they're the best of friends.

I'm not one to condemn a movie because its protagonist is an idiot man-child. Step Brothers has two of them, and that, also, is OK. No one plays this role with such headlong enthusiasm and genuine childlike glee as Ferrell, and he and Reilly made a terrific comic duo in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Jenkins and Steenburgen are dependable performers, and they lend their characters credibility that the screenplay only occasionally betrays. Derek, the successful, self-satisfied brother, who, played by Scott, looks as though he should be selling self-help videos, is a highly amusing caricature; he name-drops celebrity friends, flaunts his abs, forces singing lessons upon his family, and obliviously drives his wife into lunacy and adultery.

More often than not, Ferrell and Reilly seem more interested in entertaining themselves than their audience. Their roles allow them to smash pumpkins, trash a house while pretending to sleepwalk, record a faux rap video, and beat up middle-schoolers; most of these activities look as though they were more fun for the performers than they are for the viewers. Most of Ferrell's and Reilly's lines sound like improvisations, coarse absurdities that briefly amuse but don't really hold up as genuine film comedy. The screenplay is credited to Ferrell and director Adam McKay (who also helmed Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the aforementioned Talladega Nights), but the movie doesn't seem as though much writing went into it.

This, however, was also the case with Semi-Pro, which I did not mind. So what is the real trouble at the heart of Step Brothers? Part of it, I think, is that the two main characters are unlikable. In earlier movies, I liked Ferrell's overgrown juveniles; even when they took themselves seriously, they were innocents, helpless to contain their own high spirits, and it was impossible not to regard Frank "The Tank" Ricard of Old School as a friend. Here, Brennan and Dale are prickly, cruel, and violent, and none of their delusions are charming. Their lives are sad in way that is not merely risible, and this is a real discomfort. They trigger the same uneasy mixture of pity and disgust that people in real life sometimes provoke: There's a touch of Jerry Springer here, but it's more unnerving because Step Brothers is not deliberately gruesome. The tone remains cheerful throughout.

The conclusion of Step Brothers, too, is unpleasant. Dale and Brennan flirt with adulthood; ultimately, with the approval of Dale's father, who does an about-face in the last ten minutes, they reject it, and, when we leave the theater, they seem destined to spend the rest of their lives at their parents' house. This denouement, in which Dale and Brennan's lifestyle is commended and Dale's father gives up his lifelong dream in order to serve as their permanent babysitter, is both routine and utterly bizarre, and one of the characters even comments upon its oddness. There obviously is no reason whatsoever to approve of the behavior of Brennan and Dale, but Step Brothers does it anyway, perhaps because it can't think of any other viewpoint to support; for Brennan, it's unemployment or a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and, given the same choice, I would decide as he does.

Watching Step Brothers makes one realize how deftly Judd Apatow, who produced this misfire, and his cohorts handled the problem of adulthood in Knocked Up and Superbad. Step Brothers sees only the hell of arrested development, from which there seems to be no escape.

Comments

[abe tran]

hmmmm, so in the end, do you recommend me watching this... as well as semi-pro... or not

[Brett Yates]

If you generally like Will Ferrell's antics, then Semi-Pro will do you no harm, though it's not his best. I don't recommend Step Brothers.

[Shelly]

I liked Step Brothers way better than Semi-Pro.