Our Idiot Brother

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Our Idiot Brother (Or Saying Too Much: The Movie) is a 2011 comedy starring Paul Rudd in which he plays a organic farmer who gets busted selling marijuana to a uniformed cop (though to be fair, the cop had a rough week) and spends eight months in jail. After getting out and evicted from his ex-girlfriend's farm, he now has to live with his three sisters in Manhattan while he works different odd jobs to get enough money together to rent a goat barn. There's also a subplot of him trying to get his dog back from his ex-girlfriend.

Hilarity Ensues.

Tropes used in Our Idiot Brother include:
  • Big Applesauce: Where Ned comes to live.
  • But Now I Must Go: Ned announces that he doesn't like living in the city and is moving. "My work here is done."
  • Can Not Tell a Lie: Ned.
  • Cult: Christian's self-help group may be one of these.
  • Even the Guys Want Him: Ned. It's a little hard for him to have a threesome with a girl and her boyfriend, though.
  • Friend to All Living Things: Is there anyone that Ned doesn't like?
  • Hilarious Outtakes
  • Jerkass: Filled with them, most notably Miranda and Ned's brother-in-law.
  • Nice Guy: Exaggerated Trope. Ned is nice to his dysfunctional family, the people he meets in the city and even his Psycho Ex-Girlfriend is met more with frustration than actual anger.
  • The Messiah: Ned's philosophy is to trust everyone and believe they will 'step up and do the right thing'. His entire family (and Billy) are inspired by this and become better people by the end. His sisters describe him as "Loving everyone and everything unconditionally."
  • Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Janet. She breaks up with Ned, kicks him off the farm, and refuses to let him have his dog presumably out of spite. And she's a bitch.
  • Saying Too Much: The plot of the movie is driven by Ned's inability to keep personal details about his family and himself a secret, letting slip incriminating (and even criminal) information at inopportune moments.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ned manages to give one of these to his sisters.
  • Title Drop: Provided by Zooey Deschanel.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Ned could qualify based on three scenes. The first is selling a uniformed police officer marijuana. The second is a scene on a subway in New York. He's counting a good chunk of money when he spills something on his pants. He asks the guy sitting next to hold his money while he cleans himself up. The third where he tells his parole officer that he's smoked marijuana since the last time they met, prompting another arrest.
  • Wide-Eyed Idealist: Ned is an idealist in a sea of Jerkasses and Dysfunction Junction but by the end his idealism has rubbed off on all but one of them.