Title: The Brothers Solomon
Genre: Comedy
Cast: Will Arnett, Will Forte, Chi McBride, Kristen Wiig, …
Director: Bob Odenkirk
Release: (2007)
You know how there was a time when you were little and you saw your parents drinking coffee everyday and you thought, just from the smell of it, “Yuck, why would anyone ever drink that instead of a nice, tall plastic cup of grape juice and chocolate syrup? I’ll never drink that stuff.” And then one day you tried it for the first time and that first little sip was enough to make you recoil in wincing bitterness. And while all your aunts and uncles and grandparents had a hearty emphysema laugh at your expense you thought to yourself, “Oh yeah. That’s gross. I need to go eat some snow to wash this out.” Then, a few years go by, and you find yourself occasionally picking up a gas station french vanilla cappuccino here and there, just to get through long road trips or something, and keeping a jar of instant coffee mix around the house for those rough mornings. Before you know it you wake up one day and realize you’re drinking five cups a day, black, and have somehow come to love coffee more than at least one of your three children. Do you know this feeling I’m talking about? (And, ok, so maybe for some of us the “coffee” in this story is really whiskey, but you still know what I mean.) Well, somehow this is the same emotional arc that Wills Forte and Arnett were able to take me through from beginning to end in just the 93-minute span of The Brothers Solomon.
The story is pretty straightforward. John (Arnett) and Dean (Forte) Solomon are two socially inept (read: homeschooled) brothers who set out to find themselves a woman willing to help them have a baby to grant their ailing father his wish to have had a grandchild. With a complete lack of self or social awareness, they spend the first half of the movie fumbling through every way they can think of to try find a woman willing to help them and the second half trying even more preposterously to prepare themselves for fatherhood. Along the way there’s an occasional subplot here and there to stretch this movie out from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half for the sake of distribution, but whatever. My analysis of those subplots is “whatever.”
The only real surprise in this movie is how unexpectedly funny it turned out to be. Much like with coffee (whiskey), I came into this movie with a certain amount of preconceived distaste for Will Arnett from having smelled him before in a few other films. And, confirming my suspicions, I found myself wincing a little bit at my first few sips of him in this movie. Another hour and a half of his whole smarmiest guy in the room, Craig Kilborn-act was a drink I did not see myself planning to finish. (You think I can’t keep beating this analogy into a bloated, purple death? You watch.) But after a few scenes, Arnett started to add a new dimension to his shtick (some “sugar”, if you will) that made it a little easier to swallow. By making fun of his character’s own pathetic shortcomings and vulnerabilities, it actually made the arrogance seem that much funnier and gave the whole dynamic between him and his brother a more rich, hearty, bolder aroma.
And not to skim over the contributions of Will Forte, who was dead on funny as younger brother Dean (and also wrote this movie), but what really pushed this movie over the edge from tolerably amusing to fresh-roasted goodness was the introduction of Chi McBride’s angry/sensitive boyfriend character to the story. Between his self-righteous anger and the Solomon brothers’ lack of social awareness, the awkward conversations between the three of them made for some (wait for it …) “venti” laughs.
By the end, The Brothers Solomon was “good to the last drop”, and I even found myself asking to watch it again. (Funny, Jason never asks for a second viewing of my movies at home …).
Ok, I’m done now.
Grading
Story: B
Acting: B
Visuals: B
Originality/Innovation: B
Enjoyability: A+
Overall: A-
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