The Comedy of Manhattan Parenting, Wasted, in The Best and the Brightest

Comments (0) By Aaron Hillis Wednesday, Jun 22 2011

Details

The Best and the Brightest
Directed by Josh Shelov
Opens June 24, Quad Cinema

More About

In this Manhattan-set comedy of errors that’s seriously more error than comedy, Neil Patrick Harris and Bonnie Somerville play a barely middle-class couple who are presumably living beyond their means and contemplating whether they should give up and hightail it back to small-town Delaware. Still, they’re unwaveringly convinced that their tyke deserves a spot in one of the top private kindergartens after the application deadlines have passed (the gag being that the wait list is filled by still-pregnant mommies), forcing them to find a loophole with the help of a sassy, goofball consultant (a gung-ho Amy Sedaris, funnier than the material deserves). A single lie to a headmistress, that Harris’s tongue-tied computer programmer is actually a distinguished poet, snowballs into an increasingly outlandish, vulgar, clichéd farce in which a pervy friend’s online sex chats are misconstrued as said poetry, further dodging the film’s potential for sharp post-gentrification satire. Drearily shot with cheesy skyline pans, oppressively scored with Hallmark cutesiness, and oddly filled with filthy one-liners, cowriter-director Josh Shelov’s Tootsie-inspired ode to big-city determination is such a tonal mishmash that, if the Lifetime TV network ever dropped its decency standards and decided to work blue, here’s one for Sweeps Week.