ARTHUR (2011)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Russell Brand is a wild live wire act, a man whom we try to catch up with while he spins his tales with rapid momentum. He does it so masterfully and with such electric precision that he is a unique comic persona - a tall, lanky cartoon version of himself. There is no one else like Russell Brand. There is also no one else like Dudley Moore. So when word got out that Brand got the Arthur role for the remake, my heart sank a little. Physically, they couldn't be more opposite. The late Dudley Moore was a diminutive marvel, a rat who scurried across the screen. Russell is more physically imposing and takes up much more space. How could this "Arthur" remake work? The surprise is that it works but its intentions differ wildly from the original 1981 film.Brand is Arthur, a wealthy man who copiously drinks for laughs and to lure women in his bed, which has a magnetic field under it! In the opening scene, he drives drunk dressed as Batman in his own Batmobile and knocks down the Merrill Lynch bull (boy, my late father might not have enjoyed that). He is arrested and gets bailed out, and bails everyone else out. He is a drunk loon, or is he more of a playboy who loves playing with big, expensive toys, like a kid who never grew up. He is about to lose his billion-dollar inheritance unless he sobers up and marries the fake-as-fake-can-get socialite Susan (Jennifer Garner). Maniacal Nick Nolte (underused here) is Susan's father who threatens Arthur with a table saw!
Naturally, Arthur falls for an aspiring children's author, Naomi (Greta Gerwig), who takes tourists on unauthorized tours around Grand Central Station. They start dating and he gives her a Pez dispenser with her likeness, while they eat in an emptied-out Grand Central Station. All this is cute and lively enough but Greta doesn't have the pizazz of Liza Minnelli in the original, especially when Minnelli played a waitress who shoplifts!
"Arthur" has got a major saving grace in Helen Mirren as Hobson, the dutiful servant who is more of a mother to Arthur than Arthur's own mother. Still, Mirren's character is not written with the same kind of wit that drove Sir John Gielgud's own Hobson in the 1981 film to have some delicious and memorable zingers ("I'll alert the media!"). As for the rest of the cast, Jennifer Garner is rather unwatchable as the bitchy heiress who wants Arthur for his money. Garner has not had me at a remote "hi" since her best performance in "13 Going On 30." Since then, she has been saddled with characters who are emotionally mute and unappealing.
"Arthur" is a leisurely paced and often smartly funny film but it possesses a bit too much uplift for the story of a drunk. The original Dudley Moore picture made no apologies for Arthur - he was the same lovable drunk from start to finish. Russell Brand gives Arthur more sensitivity and plays him as some lost, misunderstood soul, as if this 2011 Arthur couldn't get in any bigger trouble than driving a Batmobile down a busy New York street. Dudley's Arthur toyed with drinking his life away. Big difference.
