REVIEW: Unfunny Arthur Mistakes Aggressive Whimsy for Charm

Arthur has his work cut out for him: He must find a way to wriggle out from beneath all these oppressive mother figures, so he can be fun-loving and happy with fun-loving and happy Naomi. But Brand's Arthur is so unbearable, the last thing you want is for him to find happiness -- that might only make him worse. Brand's aura of entitled insouciance worked beautifully in Get Him to the Greek and Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- he's great at playing the scrawny, spoiled rock star who begs for our adoration but doesn't want our love. But he's begging for that love in Arthur, and the effect is repellent. Brand himself doesn't seem comfortable with the whole thing: His jokes don't sail; they merely snap. He always looks aggravated and annoyed, even when he's supposedly in the throes of enchantment. He greets his ice-queen mother with the tepid line, "Hello, Vivienne -- I remember you from when I used to live in your womb." But deep down, they seem to be two of a kind. This Arthur is less a gentle, wounded soul than a petulant brat who insists on getting his way.

The whole enterprise reeks of desperation. This is Winer's feature debut (though he's previously directed numerous episodes of Modern Family), and he appears to have mistaken aggressive whimsy for charm. He also seems to fear that he'll lose the attention of a modern audience if he doesn't throw in the occasional frenetic chase scene, either on foot or by car. And there isn't a single actor here who doesn't look constrained, confused or frozen. Gerwig, especially, suffers: The picture's forced comic rhythms have her in a death grip, and for her interplanetary-travel style of timing to work, she needs to float free. Even Mirren looks exhausted, trudging through dreadful gags about how, as a child, Arthur became addicted to her breasts. She also falters when she's dressing down Arthur's lower-class pals. Gielgud could make this kind of cruelty funny; coming from Mirren, it has too much of an icy chill.

Some of the jokes in Arthur try to be pointed: At one point Vivienne dismissively refers to "the coffee-colored gentleman who runs this country." The line is supposed to tip us off to how clueless and racist she is (gosh -- d'ya think?), but in the context of the deadweight comic swill around it, it just comes off like a cheap shot.

With id-gone-wild movies like The Hangover, comedy has supposedly become more daring in recent years, more transgressive. But in reality -- or perhaps in the ways that really matter -- the parameters have become more constrained. The original Arthur is laced with jokes you couldn't do today: When Moore's Arthur listens to a prostitute's sad tale of how her mother died when she was seven and her father raped her when she was thirteen, he responds, in a sympathetic, well-meaning slur, "So you had six relatively good years, then?"

Oddly enough, the funniest, freest moment in this new Arthur comes when our sort-of hero makes an early, aborted attempt to attend an AA meeting (while wearing an unfunny phony beard, so no one will recognize him). As he listens to an attendee's heartfelt confession, his eyes grow bigger and wilder. He can't keep it in any longer: "This is like unhappy hour! This makes me want to drink more!" That joke is funny until, at the end of the movie, our permission to laugh at it is revoked. Talk about unhappy hour.

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