A ludicrous and difficult-to-like farce that asks viewers to identify with its protagonist’s aspirational cluelessness, Josh Shelov’s “The Best and the Brightest” manages to be simultaneously offensive and bland. Its familiar cast and made-for-TV vibe (cemented by Ted Masur’s busy, mood-deaf score) might have made it salable for off-hour television programing, but trimming its pervasive lewdness to basic-cable standards would whittle the film to nothing.
Bonnie Somerville plays Samantha, a onetime cheerleader who moves to New York in a self-pitying effort to feel as special as she did in high school — and perhaps to goad husband Jeff (Neil Patrick Harris) into finding work more glamorous than computer programing.
In a movie whose knowledge of New York City seems limited to one widely-discussed truism — it’s hell getting kids into private schools — Samantha has somehow never heard this fact. She blithely walks her kindergarten-age daughter into a string of tony schools, where administrators (and the just-pregnant women already getting in line) laugh her off.
With the help of a nutty school-placement consultant (the full-tilt Amy Sedaris, dressed in a repertoire of exotically frumpy ensembles from one scene to the next) she lands an interview at Coventry Day School — which is going great until Jeff’s buddy (Peter Serafinowicz), a sex addict who’s supposed to be babysitting their child, interrupts the meeting with news that makes them look like the world’s worst parents. The increasingly hard-to-swallow action takes a gag that’s good for a scene or two at most — that Jeff has been mistaken for a poet whose work is a kind of debased erotica — and stretches it to a point where the plot needs us to believe, for instance, that an aspiring politician would invite the recitation of porn at her dignified fundraiser.
Despite a couple of bright points (John Hodgman’s pointy-headed appreciation of “poems” that are in fact printouts of late-night sex-texting), the script will annoy even viewers who can stomach its fundamental class-blindness. The idea that Sam’s daughter would attend a public school is never broached, and in fact the word “public” isn’t even heard until a closing-scene punch line. Somerville’s performance brings no likability to her shrill character, while Harris wisely chooses detachment.
