MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

Step Brothers Rated R

Directed by Adam McKay.  Starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly.

Photo © Sony Pictures
Movie Review by Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

One of the wonderful aspects of a growing faith is that it automatically helps a person to grow more mature.  That’s what happens on the spiritual journey with Christ; the more you allow God’s presence in your life, the more you allow yourself to grow as a child of God.  That’s probably the long way around the garden to explain why God is rarely mentioned in the modern comedies that celebrate arrested development in American men.  Step Brothers tells the story of Brennan and Dale, whose mom and dad meet, fall in love, and therefore make them step brothers.  Both of the boys are about 39 years old and still living at home, so there’s going to be some trouble.  Indeed.  We have two grown men acting like young children (fighting over top bunk, eating microwave nachos) with the sex drives of teenagers (reading pornography and acting out sexually).  Sure, it’s a stupid premise, but it’s so crazy, it just might work. And it does, for short stretches at a time, in a film that seems like a great five-minute SNL skit inflated to feature film length.  The relentless swearing and sex talk is not so much mean-spirited (as critic Roger Ebert seems to think) but symptomatic of a culture in which actors are afraid to grow up and move into older male movie roles.  (How else can you explain Nicolas Cage and Harrison Ford continuing to play in action movies?)  With men behaving badly, there is very little for the women to do in these films except to serve as the foils (and sexual subordinates) to the men.  Ferrell and Reilly have good comic chemistry together and Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins (as their parents) seem to enjoy slumming in this farce.  But everyone seems to be giving less than their best, and most of the crude stuff just doesn’t yield big laughs.  It would really be something if an American director could pull off a PG rated film comedy with big laughs for all ages.  It’s possible, if all of us are willing to grow up. 

Pitchfork Rating: One halo. (There are moments of hilarious improv comedy to be found in yet one more crude comedy of arrested development.) Four pitchforks. (For constant profanity, graphic male nudity, crude language, and scenes of sexual activity.)

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