Ideal Home

Synopsis: Erasmus (Steve Coogan), a celebrity cable TV chef, and Paul (Paul Rudd), his producer, are a gay couple living in Santa Fe whose strained relationship is further tested when Bill (Jack Gore), Erasmus’s ten year old grandchild, turns up on their doorstep and they have to play the role of surrogate parents.

Ideal Home is a tidy little comedy with a well-turned script by writer-director Andrew Fleming and winning performances by Coogan and Rudd (with a sturdy contribution from Gore, already a seasoned actor despite his young age).

Revolving around an incessantly bickering long-term couple, Fleming’s script is very much in the “Cage Aux Folles” tradition, trotting out the camp clichés of affected superficiality and bitchy sniping as its protagonists are forced to deal with the intrusion of the straight world on their self-regarding universe. The dialogue is cleverly catty and often chortle-worthy but at times it is too obviously trying to be funny (for example apropos of nothing Erasmus asks “Do you want a blow job “, “Not now, we’ve got guests” Paul replies), and precisely for that reason, falling flat (I won;t even mention the joke about felching) .

I’m a fan of both Coogan and Rudd, but Coogan is much better as a performer than an actor. He is at his best in Michael Winterbottom's 'Trip' films where he plays himself or when he morphs into his caricatural comedic persona, Alan Partridge (as such he can be seen in Alan Partridge: Alpha Male, 2013).. He is amusing here too, particularly in the mock cooking show sequences, but overall his camping it up takes away somewhat from the film's more serious, albeit sentimental, side.

If Coogan the performer tends to stand out from the characters he plays Rudd on the other hand, tends to blend in, as he has done in so many similarly tidy comedies (an example being Our Idiot Brother, 2011, in which Coogan also appeared). Here, with his bushy beard and fashionably cropped hair he does exactly that as Erasmus’s long-suffering partner, nicely off-setting Coogan’s more flamboyant turn.

At the end of the day however one can’t help but feel that both characters are a little too stereotypical (compare them for instance with Cameron and Mitchell from Modern Family), The result is that straight audiences can laugh at gays and gays can laugh at themselves but it all feels a little too pat. This is somewhat odd as I gather that writer-director Fleming is gay and neither Coogan nor Rudd as far as I know, are. So Fleming presumably has pushed the film in this direction at the same time as steering it to its quite programmatic agenda of being an affirmative statement for same-sex parenting, a message which is baldly stated in the end credits.  

Even if Ideal Home is not a subtle film, it is a reasonably diverting one. It's also a hell of a product placement opportunity for Taco Bell

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