“Step Brothers” is the most deceptively radical film that Will Ferrell has ever been a part of, and arguably the most misunderstood. Reading Roger Ebert’s star-and-a-half review back when the film was first released in 2008, (where he wrote “sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare. All about me, standards are collapsing”) you’d think the world was literally coming to an end. And while “Step Brothers” is vulgar, astonishingly so, even in the wake of the gross-out comedy boom, it’s also far more than the shaggy, simple-minded raunchfest that it pertains to be on its surface. Adam McKay’s madcap poem to adolescent anarchy is also a cutting, smart dissection of 21st century parent-child dynamics and the plague of entitlement. What happens, for instance, when children take the maxim that “they can do anything” too far — to potentially destructive ends? What happens when children become men and don’t leave the house — well into their 30’s? Can one live a fulfilling life as a functioning adult and still make time for nudie mags, Shark Week and slicing melons with samurai swords? Well…
The first indication that McKay’s film isn’t your standard, dick-obsessed Apatow knockoff comes in the form of the movie’s two protagonists: Brennan and Dale, two overgrown men who have the emotional and mental intelligence of a pair of ten-year olds, and who are currently living at home with their well-to-do parents. It quickly becomes clear that Brenan and Dale are not cuddly, quippy man-children who are loveable in spite of their flaws. They are bonafides psychopaths, as remorseless and divorced from reality in their way as Charles Manson. During an intense bit of sleepwalking, they wrap their poor, helpless father (Richard Jenkins) in the Christmas tree lights and proceed to throw him down a flight of stairs. When they are unable to settle their disputes verbally, Brennan decides to bury Dale alive in the backyard. They are beyond dumb. They are damaged, depraved and cruel, and enabled to a seemingly endless degree by their parent’s considerable wealth and their innate sense of white male privilege. When they are finally forced to find suitable employment and move out of their parent’s place, you’d think someone was asking them to donate both of their kidneys.
Wisely, McKay never asks us to sympathize with them: how could we? The director is able to expose the inherent disingenuous nature of man-child comedy by painting these characters not as flawed-but-good strivers, but rather as grotesque boors acting out of naked self-interest and a chaotic urge to see social constructs laid to ruin. They may as well be on another planet altogether.
The satiric aims of the movie become clearer when we spend some time with Brennan and Dale’s parents, played by Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen as lovely, essentially decent people who stand powerless and horrified in the face of the insanity wrought by their grown sons. Their dream retirement plan is to sail around the world in a glorious yacht, but in this twisted world, no such hope can last. Brennan and Dale even manage to wreck the boat while shooting a music video for a rap song called “Boats n’ Hoes”. The pair’s wanton disregard for everyone and anything eventually begins to corrode their parent’s already-sinking marriage: dad starts staying out late nights at the Cheesecake Factory sucking down scotch, while mom remains a wreck at home, hopelessly wondering where it all went wrong. It’s all light and zany enough, but the material beneath the laughs is fucking distressing. Sadly, I believe this is a warped, comically exaggerated form of the disaffection pervasive in many upper-middle class households where privileged children are enabled in seemingly every capacity. Brennan and Dale’s dad tells his sons, in a weirdly poignant moment, to “never lose [their] inner dinosaur” — that is to say, never lose your inner child. Yes dad, but aren’t the dinosaurs a relic of an older, less enlightened time?
“Step Brothers” is a zippy, colorful nightmare of middle-class suburbia gone horribly wrong, and what happens when the American dudebro reveals his ugly, flabby insides. In the hopes of giving us a villain somehow more deplorable than Brennan or Dale, McKay presents us with Derek, (a slimy, perfect Adam Scott) Brennan’s loathsome, bro’d out and unbelievably successful younger brother. With a Bluetooth permanently lodged in his ear and a wolfish grin plastered upon his unblinking, wrinkle-free face, Derek is the 21st-century Uberdouche as Ultimate Adversary: an “Entourage” episode in human form, or the reptilian by-product of Axe body spray. He represents success in its most embellished form, and he’s also a nightmare version of what Brennan and Dale might turn into if they ever decide to grow up. When confronted with this anemic perversion of adulthood, who wouldn’t want to stay young forever? Derek is the president of Planet Bullshit In the Galaxy Of This Sucks Camel Dicks.
Mr. McKay obviously knows that Brennan and Dale are insane, but I believe that, in a way, he admires their childlike sense of wonder and stubborn refusal to age gracefully into the doldrums of middle age. “They don’t understand us,” Dale tells Brennan midway through the film. He’s wearing a Chewbacca mask when he makes this statement, because of course he is, and boom — just like that, in this surreal, ludicrous, silly-ass movie, the point becomes crystal-clear. This — this diseased, fundamentally ridiculous thing — is the face of the new American man-child. It’s disorder and madness versus soulless conformity and DVR’d specials of Dane Cook. Six pack abs versus riverboat gambling trips: pick your side, because there’s a war goin’ on.
Like many a mid-200’s smart-dumb comedy before and after it, (and many of them starring Mr. Ferrell, for what it’s worth) “Step Brothers” concerns men whose inflated self-image is drastically disproportionate to the success they experience in the real world. What makes it more than just another goofy comedy is the acidity of its bite, the precision of its aim and how often it hits its targets. Like a cross between Fergie and Jesus, “Step Brothers” is brilliantly stupid, or stupidly brilliant, or both. It’s a way-out-there generational takedown whose subtext, when you bother to parse it, is downright scalding. And more than anything, it makes me laugh like a hyena, viewing after viewing. May I never lose my inner dinosaur.
