Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/4/08
Society is a machine designed
to take little boys who love dinosaurs, have never heard anything funnier
than a fart and want to be either an Astronaut, a NASCAR driver or a Park
Ranger and grind them down into adults grateful for a chance to sit at
a desk 8 to 15 hours a day and make money for somebody else. So it's
no wonder that a movie like Step Brothers strikes such a cord without
actually being about likable characters, situations you'd want to find
yourself involved with or a story you'd believe for a second. It's
a comic primal scream about two 40 year-old men who, other than the fact
that they've added nudie magazines to the repertoire, have refused to change
one bit since they were 10. That may not be such a good thing in
practice, but by reuniting reigning master of idiocy Will Ferrell with
his Anchorman director Adam McKay and Talladega Nights co-star
John C. Reilly, it sure is fun to watch.
Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell)
lives with his Mom Nancy (Mary Steenburgen). Traumatized by a high
school humiliation engineered by his brother Derek (Adam Scott), he's utterly
unemployed and afraid to sing in public despite having “The voice of my
generation”. Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) lives with his Dad Robert
(Richard Jenkins). He loves playing the drums, wearing a Chewbacca
mask and, yeah, he's utterly unemployed. Robert is a Doctor and goes
out of town to speak at a conference attended by Nancy. It's love
at first sight, and the two of them are soon married, making the new step
brothers who share their home instant enemies. All that changes once
Dale punches Derek in the face, inspiring the two “boys” to see just how
much they have in common. But as they become fast friends, Robert
dreams of retiring and sailing the world with Nancy: he gives Brennan
and Dale a month to find jobs and get out of the house. Wanting no
part of that, the step brothers cheerfully sabotage every interview while
dreaming of starting their own worldwide media empire, starting with a
rap video called “Boats and Hos”. Alas, during production, Robert's
boat is totaled and the stress of their antics finally breaks the newlyweds
up. Now the step children of a broken home, what are Brennan and
Dale to do but... <gasp> grow up?
To paraphrase Jean Shepherd,
Step Brothers works in profanity the way some artists work in oils.
It's proudly foul, nasty and profane, and it's really, really funny.
It's not just that Brennan and Dale are a couple of arrestedly developed
imbeciles, it's how red-faced and combative they get the moment anyone
suggests that they shouldn't get their way that makes Ferrell and Reilly's
performances so funny. Make no mistake, these are not characters
you'd want to work with, sit next to on a bus, know someone who knows or
ever be in the same zip code with, but they perfectly represent that “I
want my cookie!” reflex we all have to internalize to get along in society.
How perfect then that their “big idea” to make rent money is to become
the Biggest Stars in the World. The “Boats and Hos” video hovers
hilariously between brilliant and incompetent, and either way it's just
wrong.
The one area where Step
Brothers runs into some rough water (and for some, it will be a deal
breaker) is in the decision to have Steenburgen and Jenkins play their
roles totally straight. Brennan and Dale put their parents through
hell, and while Dr. Doback's outrage is funny for a while, the collapse
of their marriage could probably have stood a little more comic spin.
But one area where it pays off brilliantly is in the movie's funniest moment:
Jenkins delivers the kind of crazed monologue we expect from Christopher
Walken about a childhood dream even more bizarre than anything the “kids”
could dream up that's transcendently hilarious, all the more so because
this is a guy we'd NEVER expect it from.
It's also that monologue
that locks in Step Brothers' point, which is that everybody's got
a little Brennan and Dale inside, buried beneath that nagging feeling that
we should be investing more in our IRAs. Even if we can't live our
entire lives mooching off Mom & Dad, there really must be some better
way than most of us find to let that crazy inner loser out to play.
To that end, the movie attacks tormentors of those young and old on our
behalf: snotty younger brothers, playground bullies (what happens
during the end credits is so wonderfully wrong it would provide fodder
for a dozen campaigns against movie violence), job interviews and Billy
Joel cover bands who won't play the 70's songs (I don't know if there actually
are any of those, but I'd be pretty tormented by the one we meet here).
But the movie also knows that nothing but trouble can come from letting
these guys totally free reign, as demonstrated by a showstopping sequence
where they use non-existent carpentry skills to build their own bunk bed.
The screenplay by Ferrell and McKay (with a story assist by Reilly) has
its' share of pop cultural in-jokes (my favorite: Dale's resume explains
a 22-year gap in employment history as “Went Kerouac on everybody's ass”),
but actually leans more heavily on character and behavior than you might
expect. Another thing it does that I always enjoy is stage a climax
with careful attention to the rhythms of a crowd-pleasing tearjerker, but
inserting nonsense in place of the actual things that formula calls for.
And the fact that I was still perversely moved by that climax only made
it all the funnier.
As mentioned before, Ferrell
is a master of short-fuse idiocy, and nobody yells funnier. Reilly,
an Oscar-nominated dramatic actor who took a wrong left turn at Albuquerque
and ended up as his perfect sidekick, is almost as good at the yelling,
and maybe a notch below on the idiocy, but still a hoot. Steenburgen,
an Oscar nominee herself, is mostly wasted. Scott is hilarious as
the snotty bastard to whom Brennan can never measure up: he basically
spends the whole movie demanding that someone punch him in the face, even
when he's not saying so. Andrea Savage does a fun deadpan as the
therapist Brennan relentlessly sexually harasses until the movie gets a
good laugh out of the obligation that she fall in love with him.
Her last line is golden.
Be warned, Step Brothers
is a vicious, no-holds-barred comedy that features relentless profanity,
characters burying each other alive, and way more of Will Ferrell's anatomy
than I felt the need to see. But it gets the job done thanks to that
same ferocious conviction. Like all good family dysfunction, sometimes
it's a little queasy. But it's also relentlessly funny and so incredibly
childish it's actually kinda poignant. And I'm still humming “Boats
and Hos”. |
