Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #219 The Brothers Solomon (2007)
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When Bob Odenkirk followed up the spectacular disaster of Run, Ronnie, Run with the back to back humiliations of Let’s Go to Prison and The Brothers Solomon it appeared that the comic genius and national treasure’s career had peaked with the extraordinary run of writing for Saturday Night Live at its late eighty peak followed by The Ben Stiller Show, Get a Life and Mr. Show and was locked irrevocably in a steep creative decline.
Who could have guessed that the best was yet to come, and that Odenkirk would come back smashingly with Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Nebraska and Little Women. Even Odenkirk’s biggest fans couldn’t have anticipated that he would become so widely beloved that when he had a heart attack on the set of Better Call Saul it was big news as a weary nation held its breath and hoped for the best.
Of course real Bob-Heads/Oden-kooks know that The Brothers Solomon might resemble Run, Ronnie, Run and Let’s Go to Prison in terms of its non-existent box-office and brutal drubbing from critics but is a markedly better, less misanthropic endeavor than Odenkirk’s earlier flops.
I’ve liked The Brothers Solomon all four times I’ve seen it yet I don’t have a hard time figuring out why it failed. It’s a film whose man-children protagonists John (Will Arnett) and Dean (Will Forte) Solomon blur the line between nice and creepy, sweet and sociopathic.
The film follows suit. It’s either an exceedingly nice movie with intermittent bursts of incongruous nastiness or an exceedingly mean-spirited movie with a curious, pervasive attack of the cutes.
Because they were raised in the North Pole in more or less complete isolation by their all too indulgent dad Ed (Lee Majors), with “friendship simulations” instead of friends and “puppetry-based sex education” instead of girlfriends John and Dean behave like space aliens who got all of their information about human behavior and humanity from 1980s sitcoms and also weren’t paying particularly close attention.
They seem like nice young men but they also seem like they might be serial killers or belong to some manner of sex and death cult.
As played by screenwriter Forte and Let’s Go to Prison’s Arnett in scarily committed performances, John and Dean are two goofily grinning, wide-eyed, disconcertingly positive peas in a pod. Due to their unique upbringing, no one in the world is like the Solomon brothers but they are more or less exactly alike.
The brothers may be defiantly out of step with the rest of humanity but that doesn’t keep them from experiencing a level of unhinged bliss generally only possible through the consumption of powerful mind-altering substances.
Then John and Dean’s father slips into what we are told is a very strong coma immediately after expressing a desire to witness the birth of his first grandchild.
The brothers don’t have girlfriends, and seem to lack even a basic understanding of romantic relationships, sex and pretty much everything else. Yet that does not keep them from trying to procreate against impossible odds in order to realize their father’s dream of living long enough to see his children have children.
So the brothers go about finding a woman to have their children the only way they know how: badly but confidently.
After a few bad taste gags at the expense of overweight women and children that land with a thud and leave a sour aftertaste the brothers find a mother for their child in surrogate Janine Rice (Kristin Wiig), who gets cold feet and decides to keep her baby rather than hand it over to men with the kind of disturbingly excessive grins that make you wonder what in the hell they could possibly be so goddamn happy about.
Wiig specializes in weird, uncomfortable energy but The Brothers Solomon relegates her to a perversely thankless straight woman role.
John and Dean inhabit a universe of their own too hermetic and tiny for anyone else. Arnett and Forte make for quite the double act. They’re uniquely in tune with each other and violently, deliberately out of sync with a world that understandably views them with weariness and no small amount of suspicion. After all, nobody is that nice.
There’s a lot about The Brothers Solomon that stubbornly does not work. The movie seems to understand women only slightly better than the brothers do and poor Chi McBride, of Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer and Let’s Go to Prison fame, is wasted in a role as an angry black janitor who is perpetually apoplectic because he thinks people assume he’s angry and a janitor because he’s black.
Yet I found myself laughing at a steady clip throughout The Brothers Solomon due to Forte and Arnett and a series of funny running gags, particularly the brothers’ fixation with challenging late fees at a local video store and the electricity in their home constantly going out because they’ve decided to save money by having their father linger in a coma at home rather than in a hospital.
The Brothers Solomon is not a great movie but a genuinely funny one with a legitimately great climactic gag that finds John and Dean making one last-ditch effort to win Janine back through the medium of sky-writing.
It’s an appropriately over-sized, cinematic gesture that’s like the legendary rake gag in The Simpsons in going on and on and on and on until it reaches a place of pure comic nirvana.
The sky-writing gag seems to take up about half of the movie’s 93 minute runtime. Needless to say those moments are the movie’s purest and funniest and sweetest.
Like Girlfriend’s Day, The Brothers Solomon is a weird movie with a lot of oddball charm and a surprising number of quotable lines and unforgettable gags.
The Brothers Solomon found Odenkirk growing as a filmmaker and learning from his mistakes. One of the things Odenkirk very well could have learned from the poorly received comedy is that his extraordinary gifts lay elsewhere, as a uniquely gifted writer and actor rather than as a cinematic auteur.
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