On the audio commentary for Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson is unrestrained in his love for John C. Reilly. “There’s no one who makes me break down crying, falling on the floor, thinking I’m going to throw up laughing [like him]. Every single thing he does makes me laugh. It’s kind of criminal. I just can’t see the forest for the trees with John Reilly. Maybe he sucks in this movie—I don’t know! Maybe he’ll suck in the next one, but it’s all good to me. I just can’t get enough of him. I could stare at that fucking face all day long.”Wow—you and me both, P.T.! You and me both! With those beady little deep-set eyes, those jug ears, and that mop of receding curls... I mean, you couldn’t draw a funnier-looking guy if you tried. I don’t know who originally had the idea of pairing Reilly up with Will Ferrell—was it Judd Apatow? Director Adam McKay? Ferrell himself?—but whoever it was, it was a stroke of genius. Most comedy teams are a union of opposites, but with Reilly and Ferrell, part of the humour derives from how perfectly matched they are, these two flabby, dimwitted, overgrown, macho babies, both completely oblivious to how the world perceives them—naturally they’re best friends.
Of course, as Step Brothers opens, they’re sworn enemies. Ferrell is mama’s boy Brennan Huff, Reilly is underachieving would-be musician Dale Doback; both appear to have stalled emotionally around the age of 10, and neither of them has a job. And so when Ferrell’s mom (Mary Steenburgen) marries Reilly’s dad (Richard Jenkins), neither of them takes kindly to the idea of having strangers upsetting their coddled lifestyle. (“This wedding is horseshit!” screams Ferrell as he storms out of the reception.) But it doesn’t take long for the two men to realize how much they have in common—nonexistent career ambitions, a passion for Shark Week, a homoerotic desire to have sex with John Stamos—and become best buddies.
Step Brothers was produced by Judd Apatow, and the script (by Ferrell and Adam McKay) takes the standard Apatow “slacker manchild is forced to grow up” template and exaggerates it to an almost surreal extreme. Ferrell and Reilly aren’t just unambitious slackers like Seth Rogen in Knocked Up or Jason Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall; these two guys are selfish and juvenile to the point of sociopathy. As they lie together at night in their twin beds, they pass the time by whispering increasingly baroque death threats to each other. At one point, Ferrell literally tries to bury Reilly alive—and when Reilly climbs out of his grave and attacks him, Ferrell hilariously starts screaming, “Zombie! Zombie!” And once they actually become friends, they actually become more destructive—working in tandem, their minds start coming up with idiotic projects they never could have conceived individually.
Look—I know this is a stupid movie. But making a movie as blissfully stupid as this one is not as easy as it looks. It takes an inspired mind to come up with the scene where Ferrell and Reilly go out to the garage to “practice their karate” (which turns out to be code for “kick the shit out of a bunch of pumpkins”) or the bit where Ferrell and Reilly both sleepwalk downstairs and systematically destroy the kitchen, or just to come up with an exchange like Ferrell and Reilly’s apoplectic response when Jenkins suspends their TV privileges. “This house is a prison!” Ferrell shouts.
“On the planet Bullshit!” adds Reilly, to which Ferrell adds, “In the galaxy of This Sucks Camel Dicks!”
I can’t help it—I’m a sucker for this stuff. I’m such an easy Will Ferrell lay that I even gave a pass earlier this year to Semi-Pro. But you’ve gotta say this for Step Brothers: as in every movie they do, Ferrell and Reilly commit completely to their characters’ emotions. When the two stepbrothers turn their beds into bunk beds, Reilly gazes in wonder at their makeshift carpentry work, the upper bed held up with random, rickety planks of wood and a couple of hockey sticks, and when he says, “This looks like something you’d buy in a store!” you don’t doubt that he’s truly awestruck by his own handiwork.
The movie never really comes up with a good explanation for how these two guys got this way—well, Steenburgen is a bit of an enabler, but surely a hardass like Jenkins would have laid down the law to Reilly years earlier—and if you thought the female characters in Knocked Up were problematic, Step Brothers represents several large steps backwards.
Most Apatow productions end with their maladjusted heroes pulling up their socks and joining the grownup world, but not Step Brothers—here, interestingly, even though Ferrell and Reilly each have a brush with responsibility, the film ends with them happily fleeing the adult world, retreating instead to a treehouse well-stocked with pirate hats, Chewbacca masks, and plenty of back issues of Hustler. The image made me smile. Coming so soon after seeing Christian Bale in The Dark Knight, it was nice to see a couple of middle-aged guys actually getting some pleasure out of dressing up in silly costumes.
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