Russell Brand reprises Dudley Moore in this week's Arthur, but parallels with Peter Cook may define his Hollywood career, says John Patterson
The real-life Russell Brand encountered a strange kind of defeat, oddly co-mingled with victory, at the US box office last weekend with his remake of the Dudley Moore hit Arthur. Defeat, that is, at the hands of the far more successful animated Russell Brand of the Easter Bunny comedy Hop, which lingered at No 1 for a second week in a row. Despite a month-long supersaturation of commercials for Arthur ? perhaps mounted because Brand has yet to connect at a gut level with American audiences ? takings were a relatively meagre $12m. Does this suggest that the American public will only cotton on to Russell Brand in rabbit form?
Americans are in two minds about Brand. I meet people who love him beyond all reason, but others harbour a loathing for him that's almost unhinged. Some of this can be laid at the door of America's profound suspicion of fey, even slightly sexually ambiguous Englishmen, the last of whom to make an enduring impression on US culture was the Midnight Rambler-era Mick Jagger. Glam rock never took off here: David Bowie didn't hit big until he exchanged Ziggy-esque androgyny for Thin White Duke suits. Brand, who dresses like Steven Tyler's little sister, has pre-empted such talk with his marriage to Katy Perry (one of those celeb-summit unions that makes you think of lawyers, not bridal bouquets).
Just as no one in the States knows much about Brand and, for instance, Andrew Sachs's granddaughter, no one in America in 1981 had ever heard of the splenetically Rabelaisian Derek and Clive (or even, frankly, of Pete'n'Dud). Which is to say, you can shed a lot of unpleasant, old-country baggage at US customs, and reset your familiarity/contempt meter all the way back to zero. But the core problem may be simple likability, and whether Brand has it in the way that Dudley Moore undoubtedly did (he was forever assailed by unfeasibly tall Hollywood beauties seeking to mother him to the brink of sexual oblivion).
Another hitch may be that Brand's version of Moore-ish lovability is adulterated with something of Peter Cook's aloof spikiness. Pete'n'Dud were a classic British comedy duo, but only one of them translated well into American. Moore was a global superstar for a season or so, but Cook, the Thelonious Monk of improvised British comedy, travelled poorly, like a delicate vintage, co-starring for one miserable season in a mirthless US network rehash of Two's Company called The Two Of Us in 1981-2, precisely at Moore's high tide. Brand embodies elements of both ? the cute and the mean ? and that love-hate feeling he provokes among Americans suggests that, even with two films topping the box office simultaneously, the United States is still in two minds about him when he comes without rabbit ears.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/16/will-russell-brand-be-reborn-in-the-usa
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