Our Idiot Brother

Impressions before seeing it
The trailer was mildly amusing, but mostly I liked its cast of really cool comedic actors.

How was it?
The title of this movie (and to a certain extent, the trailer) is misleading, as it connotes a zany comedy about a bumbling fool ruining his sisters' lives when it would be more accurate to call it a dramedy about the most naive person on the planet. He does ruin his sisters' lives, but everything he does is done with such good intentions that we can't help but like him even as he strolls through the movie spilling everyone's biggest secrets. He is an idiot, but he really doesn't know any better. Besides, Our Naive Brother doesn't have the same ring to it.

Rudd has already worked with Banks, Deschanel, and Rashida Jones on other projects (playing their boyfriend in all of them), and I like to think it facilitated the screen chemistry here even though he's now playing their brother, or closer to a brother in-law in Jones's case. I believed them as a family because the love/hate dynamic was well balanced. However, I felt like the characters may have been too generic or something... They weren't boring, but they didn't jump out and command my fascination, either. They lacked pizazz.

With such a great comedic cast - which also includes Adam Scott, Steve Coogan, Kathryn Hahn, and up-and-coming comedian T.J. Miller - Our Idiot Brother pulls a Funny People with an unexpectedly distorted comedy/drama ratio. Miller's was probably the next funniest character after Rudd's, and that was only because they were both playing two versions of the same character. It may be a personal thing, but if I go into a movie thinking that it's going to be a comedy, I tend to expect a fairly high number of jokes, and as a result I'm sometimes let down by dramedies. But once in a while, they shoot up to my top three, like Little Miss Sunshine. Our Idiot Brother wasn't bad, but it's no Little Miss Sunshine.

Recommendation
I love it when a bunch of cool people are all in the same movie (has anyone ever made a "top 10 ensemble casts" list? Maybe I should get on that someday), so on some level I probably would've enjoyed this movie no matter what. If it were done with unknown actors it probably would be almost completely mundane, but it has a little humour and a little heart, and that's not too shabby.