Review of Arthur (2011) by Shiira — 25 Apr 2011

Arthur Bach(Dudley Moore) is going nowhere fast. In the original 1981 version of "Arthur", the millionaire drunk races his Porsche around a circular track, and even though the late filmmaker doesn't overemphasize the point with an extended long take like Sofia Coppola did in "Somewhere", even the most amateur of semiologists can locate the metaphor.

Johnny Marco, the famous film star who makes revolution after revolution on a deserted motorway in the Coppola film, like Bach, the perpetually inebriated heir to a major corporation, is no stranger to melancholy despite all appearances of having it all.

If Johnny only had a snobby butler with a pithy manner of speaking. Hobson(John Gielgud) won't have none of Arthur's moaning and groaning about being unloved and miserable. Despite being a transplanted Brit, you can never really take the Englishman out of the English, and people from the U.

K. believe in a stiff upper lip, not a quivering lower one. After Arthur removes both his helmet and goggles upon Hobson's request, the longtime manservant(and surrogate father) promptly slaps him in the face like an anal-retentive mobster, while calling Bach a "selfish bastard" for good measure.

The unhappy playboy catches the customarily stoic old man at his breaking point. Hobson's opinion on "what's the worst part of being [Arthur]" differs from his arrested developing charge, and although he loves the "little s*it", the valet can take only so much narcissism and ignorance.

He sets Arthur straight, overstepping his bounds as a mere servant by dealing out some light corporal punishment, like a father. That's what Johnny needs: a few b*tch slaps to the face for being so out of touch with the way people of lesser means live, but the only prominent male in the actor's life, Sammy(Chris Pontius), is an enabler, a playmate for both Marco and his daughter Chloe(Elle Fanning), a girl too young to be the steadying influence that the overgrown child needs.

That's what the new Arthur(Russell Brand) needs too, a father figure; a butler instead of a nanny, as suggested by the movie itself in the opening scene where the much taller(and less lovable) layabout rams his Batmobile into an anatomically correct bull statue.

Considering that the new "Arthur" places the well-heeled millionaire into a personal world dominated by strong women, a pointed juxtaposition presents itself through Arthur's close proximity to the bull's gigantic golden testicles.

It's an insinuation of a man, a mama's boy who's been emasculated by the fairer sex. Recast as a woman, Hobson(Helen Mirren) treats Arthur as if he was still a boy, reading to him a children's book about a frog and a toad before he's put asleep.

The butler, on the other hand, may tend to his employer's needs, but he does so with a sense of irony, by never coddling Arthur to such an unhealthy extent. Following his master's request that he should draw him a bubble bath, Gielgud sarcastically quips, "Perhaps you'd like me to come in there and wash your d*ck for you," and in the waiting room of his father's workplace, Gielgud's Hobson makes a dry joke about going for ice cream, as a response to Arthur's insistence on acting like a petulant child.

In the presence of his father, Stanford Bach, Arthur learns the bargaining terms associated with his upcoming engagement to Susan Johnson(Jill Eikenberg). Marry the woman, or lose seven hundred fifty million dollars.

In the remake, the conditions are the same, but not the sex of the blackmailer. Ms. Bach, working in concert with a completely revamped Susan(no longer the doormat who loves Arthur unconditionally in the original), lays the law down to her son, in which his fiancee, Vivienne's top lieutenant in the family company, views marriage as a business partnership.

Susan is ashamed of the stigma tied to "new money", therefore undermining her blue collar father's pride in being a self-made man. She wants the Bach name. Susan doesn't love Arthur. And yet, the unlicensed tour guide hardly seems the right fit for the playboy either.

Of all things, she tells bedtime stories. He already has Hobson for that. Earlier in this new "Arthur", echoing the scene where Gielgud slaps around Moore on the race track, Mirren knocks out Brand with a swift right while former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield looks on.

Since Hobson had breastfed Arthur well-past an age which society would deem acceptable, she should tell him that the punch is a pointed one, a wake-up call to finally grow up. Unlike the butler, the nanny doesn't really prepare Arthur for adulthood.

The man-child sees himself as Batman, but really, he's more the Robin-type, the sidekick. He's Batman by default, since the chauffeur, another enabler, seems to be his only male friend. In the original "Arthur", Hobson is clearly the Caped Crusader to the titular character's boy in "short pants".

Sometimes a woman can't do a man's job.