Perhaps it’s been thirty years and no one remembers Dudley Moore’s scotch guzzling, prostitute bedding, mischievous multi-millionaire alcoholic. Maybe today’s audiences won’t be familiar with the Oscar winning film, in all its perfectly written outrageous and self-deprecating grandeur. Every person involved with Arthur (2011) is betting the farm on it.
Television director Jason Winer (Modern Family) teams up with Borat screenwriter (Peter Baynham) to create a new version of Arthur, which loses nearly all its tenderness and sincerity in the revamping. The title character spends every waking second with a drink in his hand, figuring out the best way to spend his family’s millions, whose cushy life is threatened when he’s forced to marry a woman he doesn’t love – or be cut off financially.
It’s quite obvious that today’s billionaire heiresses gone wild and A-list celebrities’ very public rehab stints might make Steve Gordon’s 1981 story seem as common as supermarket tabloid fare.
Baynham’s answer to inflation and a culture acclimated with alcoholism? Ramp up Arthur’s car collection to include the batmobile and pawn off the drinking as a hobby until the last second.
Unlucky Englishman Russell Brand carries most of the burden of this year’s Arthur, reprising the role Moore made iconic. Brand isn’t altogether a failure; slapstic exploits including dangerous encounters with a table saw (and his tongue) are as poignant and moving as Mr. Winer could hope them to be.
But Brand’s incarnation of Arthur feels more like an oddly extroverted escaped mental patient than a man struggling with the disease of alcoholism. It’s difficult to differentiate Brand’s Arthur as wildly inebriated or just plain bizarre.
Gordon’s characters have been rewritten and genders replaced to anchor this Arthur by women. Not even Helen Mirren can salvage the role that won John Gielgud an Oscar, playing Arthur’s lifelong companion and assistant Hobson. And Jennifer Garner and Nick Nolte (Arthur’s fiancé and future father-in-law) are as uncomfortable delivering Baynham’s soggy dialogue as they’ve looked in recent memory.
It is worth noting that the romantic relationship for which Arthur is willing to give up his fortune (love interest played by Greta Gerwig) is so poorly defined here, that the would-be-moving scenes are the most awkwardly humorous in the film. Intoxicated billionaire-meets-soulmate courting goes as far as Arthur giving his love Pez dispensers with replicas of their respective heads.
This film is lonely and pathetic in all the wrong ways, leaving it looking less like the Arthur it could have been and more like a marriage of Dumb and Dumber meets Richie Rich covered by TMZ.
Someone tell Jason Winer and friends they just lost the farm.
-Hillary Smotherman
