Directed by Jesse Peretz
Written by David Schisgall & Evgenia Peretz
 

Cast
Paul Rudd as Ned
Elizabeth Banks as Miranda
Zooey Deschanel as Natalie
Emily Mortimer as Liz
Rashida Jones as Cindy

Rated R for sexual content including nudity, and for language throughout

Ask just about any filmmaker and they’ll tell you that their perfect cast has never acted a day in their life:  all the better not to carry previous associations and allow an audience to view them exclusively as their characters.  This, of course, flies in the face of the way most people watch movies, with our love of familiar faces who help to bind us to stories that are, you know, not always perfect.  When a cast is chock full of people you really like from past roles, that does an awful lot of a movie’s work for it, and it’s hard to remember the last movie I saw deeper in performers I really like than My Idiot Brother.  Jesse Peretz’s comedy about three messed-up sisters and their slacker brother who introduces a shocking element of honesty into their lives after his release from prison is a cute little movie, albeit one best enjoyed by folks more familiar with the various California lifestyles its characters live.  But, MAN what a cast, and Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Rashida Jones and Adam Scott are particularly sharp.  Brother is a sweet little end-of-summer comedy:  nothing to get worked up about, but a fun 100 minutes of watching actors who know this genre inside-out show what they can do.

Ned (Paul Rudd) sells organic produce at a stand, and when a uniformed police officer asks him very nicely, he’s happy to sell him some weed.  After time off for good behavior, he’s released from prison but needs a place to live.  He’s rebuffed by his girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn), who’s moved on to a new slacker, Billy (T.J. Miller) and also insists on keeping Ned’s beloved dog Willie Nelson.  So he moves in with his mom (Shirley Knight), but is quickly itching to get out and turns to his three sisters.  First, he moves in with Liz (Emily Mortimer), who gives him a job as assistant to her documentarian husband Dylan (Steve Coogan).  Then it’s on to magazine writer Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), where Ned zeroes in on the obvious romantic sparks between her and her upstairs neighbor Jeremy (Adam Scott).  Finally, he’s shipped off to the quasi-commune Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) shares with her girlfriend Cindy (Rashida Jones).  At each stop, Ned messes things up with his unfailing knack for charming people and then being completely honest with them.  With all their relationships on the rocks and Ned back in jail after being too honest with his probation officer (Sterling Brown), can anything save this family?

Rudd is playing against type here, as a sweet, dim slacker rather than his usual cynical smart career types, but what makes him a movie star is that he’s just so darn likable no matter what kind of mistakes he makes, so he’s a perfect choice to play a guy who’s a transformative influence on others without even trying.  Ned’s too dumb to know when to lie to the people he loves, and it’s Our Idiot Brother’s debatable but optimistic thesis that while total honestly hurts at first, lies are even more corrosive to our personal lives.  Writers David Schisgall & Evgenia Peretz (Jesse’s sister) skillfully stack the deck by laying out a series of personal conflicts for his sisters that are indeed best served by the truth no matter how they might appear.

The rest of the cast splits between those playing to and against their type.  Deschanel has mastered self-absorbed whimsy as either an idealized love interest (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) or a predatory user (500 Days of Summer) and veers toward the later here, while still making an adorable couple with Jones, who’s got some dorky glasses to “lesbian-up” her trademark spunky professionalism.  I loved that she and Rudd got to play a significant subplot together, since they were such a terrific couple in I Love You, Man.  Coogan really only has one character (although sometimes he’s a miniaturized Roman Centurion version of it), and here he’s allowed to run it to its logical hissable conclusion rather than expecting us to like him just a little.

We’re to remember the poised, professional Mortimer we know as the “Before” to Liz’s frumpy “After”:  there’s a funny scene where Miranda and Natalie try to stage a personal appearance intervention.  Scott, who specializes in cocky jerks, shows great, engaging vulnerability and has sweet chemistry with Banks, who’s well outside her “nice girl who always wears jeans” wheelhouse and makes Miranda memorably wrong-headed when she could easily come off as just a bitch in the hands of a less naturally empathetic actress.

All is not perfect:  the less time spent on the farm with Janet and Billy the better, and the movie thinks naming a dog Willie Nelson is a lot funnier than it is.  The episodic narrative doesn’t exactly explode with dramatic urgency, and the way things wrap up is random to say the least.  But Our Idiot Brother is mostly designed as a showcase for its cast, and the filmmakers have assembled as good of one as a festival flick could ask for:  and its warm-hearted, happily-ever-after worldview should play better with the average viewer than a lot of so-called Indie Comedies.  As an added bonus, because it is so much about the cast, it’s the rare movie you can pretty much tell if you’ll like or not by looking at the poster.