Film

'Step Brothers': Comedy Fumbles for Laughs

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, July 25, 2008

Judd Apatow has a lot to answer for. It’s not easy to do what he does. He makes romantic comedies with full hearts and filthy mouths, keeping the delicate balance between vulgarity and sincerity. When he’s directing his own scripts, he spins gold: ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’, ‘Knocked Up’. As a producer, however, letting his friends and colleagues take the reins, his track record is spottier: earlier this year came the abominable ‘Drillbit Taylor’, following last year’s severely overrated ‘Superbad’. ‘Step Brothers’ is another Apatow production written and directed by people who like the sound of the F-word but are less adept at putting it in the mouths of good characters in the midst of good stories. Apatow has become a powerful name in Hollywood; a wave of his pen can make the difference between a red light and a green light. He should be pickier about where he signs.

The director is Adam McKay (he of ‘Talladega Nights’, ‘Anchorman’, and the Saturday Night Live digital shorts) and his co-writers are stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, and together they make a film that doesn’t go off the rails because it doesn’t have rails at all. They pull the train haplessly along the gravel and wood slats until it tips over, killing most on-board. It doesn’t seem to have been directed much at all; McKay may or may not have been present on set during the filming of many of the scenes, which spin and careen and caterwaul, uncontrolled, until they tucker themselves out. Ferrell and Reilly, talented both, would have benefitted from a firmer hand at the helm, to restrain their loose-limbed comic exertions.

The screenplay — or rather, the meager clothesline on which the film hangs its gags — tells the story of Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly), two forty-year-old men who still live with their parents, until their respective mother and father marry and merge the household. Wackiness, in theory, ensues. But ‘Step Brothers’ doesn’t contain scenes so much as setups, from which Ferrell and Reilly riff relentlessly. Sleepwalking scenes devolve into the throwing of breakable objects. Verbal and physical fights become disorganized melees without a discernible comic strategy other than to be loud and gesticulate. Both actors are better than this, funnier than this, and seem to be responding to a dearth of ideas.

Most of the film’s characters are consistently unpleasant. Brennan’s brother Derek (Adam Scott) is a self-important demon who believes his success gives him license to belittle others. Dale’s father (Richard Jenkins) withholds affection from his own son while instead fawning over Derek, who is clearly a monster, but no one cares because he makes a lot of money and drops a lot of famous names. Derek’s wife Alice (Kathryn Hahn) is mentally unbalanced; she’s in love with Dale, which says all you need to know about her mental state. As for the title characters, they seem to be developmentally challenged, but don’t make up for it with any childlike warmth or affection. Rather, they’re narcissists, believe themselves entitled, and are willfully self-deluded about their own superiority. There is hope for one character: Brennan’s mother (Mary Steenburgen), who is a co-dependent enabler, but with some therapy could move away from this lot to a movie where she, and we, would be happier.

Good films have been made about unlikable people, but there’s a violence to the way this group is assembled. In-between the few intermittent laughs — and to the film’s credit there are a handful — are scenes that are deeply dispiriting, where the characters humiliate themselves or each other, or worse; this is a film that deteriorates to the point where attempted murder is played for thoughtless yuks. I was sad to regard them and began to suspect that I had more sympathy for them than the filmmakers did.

More times than I care to remember in the last few years, I’ve sat in front of movie screens wondering why filmmakers expect me to laugh at the display of abject misery or mean-spiritedness for its own sake. Is this trend of cynicism-as-comedy new, or am I late to the party? Am I too nice for this new brand of humor — the acid bitterness of ‘Superbad’ and ‘Drillbit’, and ‘Borat’ before them? No, that can’t be: I’m a fan of South Park, which on any given week is meaner and funnier than any of those films. The problem, instead, is a lack of wit, complacency, the belief that stringing together vulgarities and inanities will suffice as comedy, without a clever idea to give them form or substance. The problem, at its most fundamental, is laziness. Step Brothers is a lazy movie.

Check out ‘Step Brothers’ Official Site