The House Next Door

By David Levinson

[Editor's Note: This essay is a revised version of one that appeared at The Lumière Reader.]

[Step Brothers streets today on DVD and Blu-Ray.]

Despite the appearance of having emerged, apropos of nothing, from the Judd Apatow joke factory, it’s hard not to read the movies’ oft-explored subject of arrested development as a backlash against the teen sex comedy’s pithy nostalgia. For the past three years, this short-sighted indulgence—sold by Hollywood studios as a definitive rite of passage—has found itself jutting up against a more conservative edge, one where drunken teens opt for abstinence, aborting an unplanned pregnancy is a non-question, and family becomes the well-earned endpoint of two hours worth of struggle. Clearing away the bong smoke, Apatow offers us nappy-haired party animals and overgrown geeks staring into a morning after of new responsibility.

Lately, as the sub-genre (movement? cult?) has gained momentum, there’s been a steady flow of diffusion-line works produced under the Apatow Factory seal, with any number of future projects perpetually clogging up IMDb’s digital horizons. Riffing on the blueprint laid out in Apatow’s self-directed comedies, The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007), each film plays as an undeniable sibling of the same universe—an impression reinforced by the shared pop-cultural sensibility, leisurely rhythms, and tight-knit family of actors whose obvious rapport shines through on-screen. In that sense, unless I’m mistaken, Adam McKay’s Step Brothers is the first “post-Apatow” comedy of arrested development, given that, despite being produced by the man, as well as featuring a cameo by Seth Rogen, it falls under the creative control of an entirely different comedy brand, namely the McKay-Ferrell axis.

As the brains behind Anchorman (2004) and Talladega Nights (2006), the pair specialize in ‘shtick’ comedy (Will Ferrell plays a self-absorbed newsman; Will Ferrell plays a self-absorbed NASCAR driver), meaning that the failure of Step Brothers inevitably comes down to a clash in sensibilities: Unwilling to mine his on-screen persona for genuine pathos, nor bury his ego in a wider sense of zeitgeist, this is essentially Will Ferrell playing a self-absorbed 40-year old hikikomori. Nevertheless, as an unfortunate flubbing of such a well-established enterprise, I thought it might be worth comparing Step Brothers to its counterparts over in Apatow-land in an effort to understand how it fits into the bigger picture of arrested development.

Apatow’s comedies have always impressed me for their ability to split the difference between comic realism and the slick world of TV reality. Both TFYOV and Knocked Up use the sitcom as a kind of aesthetic rallying point—a fact which might warrant an automatic write-off in most critics’ books. But rather than force-feeding us ersatz visions of comfort, Apatow’s affection for TV cuts both ways: At the same time as he champions it as an implement of the schlub—thereby positioning himself against high culture—he also seems wary of the blunted vision of reality it peddles. Granting voice to that ambivalence is Knocked Up’s Pete (Paul Rudd), who, in counseling Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) over his impending absorption into a world of adult responsibility, urges that “marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.”

On the one hand, the reference is a pretty clear throwing down of the gauntlet—an appeal made for an emotional palette more complex than a laugh track might provide. But more than the rest of Apatow’s shout-outs to the bargain-bin debris of pop culture (“Mr. Skin” anyone?), the allusion to Raymond also manages to walk a thin line between snarky breaking-of-the-fourth-wall and the earnest regret of a man whose most relevant frame of reference is primetime TV. On the whole, what Apatow & co. present is a strange and entirely modern dilemma, where the more pains the characters take in trying to establish themselves as ‘ordinary’ people, the more they threaten to fizzle out in a self-reflexive seizure. For Apatow’s characters—stuck in a landscape pitched somewhere between E! television and unkempt 80s nostalgia—growing up thus becomes a matter of affirming one’s existence as a flesh-and-blood being (prone to love, disappointment, etc.) over the shallow simulacrum of media culture.

In the case of Knocked Up, that need to connect was framed as an accidental romance, in which Seth Rogen’s bottom-feeder, after a drunken hook-up in a bar, butted hearts with a media heiress who was way out of his league. Likewise, The 40 Year Old Virgin took its lead’s semi-crude conquest and watched as it bloomed into a genuinely sweet union. As critics have pointed out, with varying degrees of tolerance, romance in Apatow’s world is a lopsided affair, in which gorgeous women repeatedly succumb to the lure of geeks and directionless stoners. But that one hiccup of wish-fulfillment aside, both films succeed in mapping out a zeitgeist where the bland comfort of sitcom life—both visually/materially, and in the specific brand of camaraderie it affords—has become a point of stasis.

Neither Ben Stone nor Andy “The 40-Year Old Virgin” Stitzer actively chooses to leave that world behind; in both cases they’re goaded on by some external sense of pressure. But as they struggle to find their footing in their new climate (a conflict Apatow expresses visually by mapping out the same generic scenery we’ve become accustomed to seeing on TV [mall-shop interiors, suburban living-rooms, etc.] and blowing it up via the 2.35:1 frame), we learn that, save for the harmless dissent of pot-smoking, growing up is the most transgressive act on offer because it means dispensing with ironic posturing for the sake of opening oneself up to the possibility of (un)happiness. Whereas the sitcom regards the family unit as inseparable from the privileged lifestyle it peddles, Apatow ultimately views those two phenomena as being at deliberate odds with one another.

In contrast to the work of Judd Apatow, which tries to nail the mood of the culture-at-large, Adam McKay’s Step Brothers refuses to substantiate its leads, settling instead for a mangled endorsement of their delinquency. As it so happens, it’s McKay who most seems to have taken the lessons of the sitcom to heart—yet rather than employ them as a point of difference, he blindly incorporates them into the film’s structure. Thus, eager to the cut to the chase, the film sloppily dispenses its TV-ready premise during the opening montage: Set to the jaunty rhythms of Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk,” we witness the meet-cute between Dr. Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Nancy (Mary Steenburgen), who lock eyes during a medical conference. Mutually enraptured, the two relocate to a hotel room where, poised on the brink of lovemaking, Nancy offers a caveat: Her 39-year old son Brennan (Ferrell) still lives at home with her. Thankfully, as luck (or lazy screenwriting) would have it, so does Robert’s 40-year old son Dale (John C. Reilly). Cut to: Wedding bells, shortly after which the four adults find themselves living together under Robert’s roof.

From those innocuous beginnings, the film takes a sharp turn into freewheeling crudity. In keeping with the sub-genre’s conventions, McKay pits his characters’ regression against the numb comfort of their surroundings, but rather than explore that tension to any real effect, Step Brothers remains perversely close-minded, milking the brothers’ aggravation at their new living arrangement as an excuse for an endless volley of bullying. Naturally, these being post-punchline times, the two comedians swap wit for invective, which means any semblance of a ‘joke’ now rests entirely on the actors’ delivery (sample line: “You're a big, fat, curly-headed fuck!”). When the litany of F-words proves inadequate, however, McKay forces the action into more gross-out territory, delivering a scene where Brennan tea-bags Dale’s beloved drum kit. Once again, upon seeing Ferrell’s stunt-balls straddling the instrument’s surface, my thoughts drifted to Apatow, who likewise opted to puncture the surface of Knocked Up with a shot of Katherine Heigl’s vagina. But while Apatow’s physical candidness worked in context (jolting Ben Stone out of his sexist myopia), McKay’s reeks of the desperate scouring of comedy’s last uncharted territories.

Given Step Brothers’ unwillingness to qualify its leads, all its antics really amount to is an unpleasant pipeline into the comedian’s ego. For the sake of narrative conflict, a psychological backdrop is eventually provided for Brennan, who—revealed to be a talent singer in his childhood—has nevertheless remained silent ever since he was humiliated by his older brother Derek during a junior-high stage show. But aside from that flimsy plot-device, Dale and Brennan remain brazenly unaccounted for, driven neither by the crippling sense of deprecation that propelled Jerry Lewis’s characters, nor the cultural glut that weighs over Apatow’s man-children. It’s as if McKay were simply deferring to the existence of ‘arrested development’ as a cemented cultural phenomenon, thus bucking the need for overt moralizing.

Stripped of any internal resistance beyond the strictly pragmatic (halfway through the movie, Robert expresses his plans to sell the family home and sail around the world, meaning that Dale and Brennan will be forced to fend for themselves), Step Brothers feels like a giant playground built around its audiences’ desire for guilt-free anarchy. (The fact that ‘growing up’ here is equated with the lifestyle led by Brennan’s brother Derek—an SUV-driving control-freak who “hasn’t had a carb since 2004”—only drives the point home). Try as he might though, McKay can’t keep the charade up forever; in the end, he buckles, delivering a final turnaround in which his two doofus leads start up their own successful business venture, as well as bag two more-than-adequate love interests. In its own perverse way—as a have-it-all buffet in which the protagonists get what they want without committing to any real change—Step Brothers might actually have more to say about a culture of privileged white kids who refuse to grow up. Nevertheless, that unintended ‘honesty’ doesn’t automatically make for better cinema.
___________________________________________
David Levinson is a freelance writer living in Auckland, New Zealand. He runs the blog Movie Writers, Businessmen & Gangsters.