Generally, comedies do not take place in our reality, and, as such, shouldn't be judged as if they did. That's the mistake I made with Young Einstein. This movie does not take place in a reality that's even close to ours. In fact, the entire movie feels like it's a peak inside some twisted, alternate dimension. Which, I suppose, is what we can all expect from a guy named Yahoo Serious.
Writer and director Serious (which means this truly is a "Serious film") turns the life of Albert Einstein completely inside out. I'm not exactly sure how the great scientist would have taken this movie, I just know I laughed my ass off.
Beginning on a Tasmanian apple farm, we find young Einstein (Serious) living with his parents and feeling less then satisfied with life. His mind brewing with cool ideas (electric instruments, the laws of motion, and that fact that everything is connected . . . somehow) he tells his father (Peewee Wilson) of his dream to someday be a scientist. Mr. Einstein, in turn, show's Albert Grandpa Einstein's lab. Old Einstein spent his whole life trying to come up with a way to get bubbles into beer, and never succeeded. Now it's time for Albert to carry on the tradition.
Al, up the challenge, spends some time thinking about it before coming up with the formula for putting bubbles into beer: E=mc², the formula for splitting beer atoms. Overjoyed, his parents urge him to travel to the patented office in Sydney. Donning a duster and hat over his overalls (damn, I gotta get me one of those), Al sets off.
Along the way he meets Marie Curie (Odile Le Clezio), who is infatuated with him and his idea, and Preston Preston (John Howard), who'll form the 3rd point of this love triangle.
Once he reaches Sydney, Al finds that you can't patented and idea and is left stranded with no money to get home. Luckily, Preston offers him a job as a patented clerk. Maybe the British bastard isn't such a bad guy after all . . .
Psyche! It's all a ploy to steal Albert's idea and win the Nobel Prize for the first bubbles-into-beer machine. Instead of splitting one beer atom, this machine will split hundreds, perhaps even thousands of beer atoms.
That's right, Preston has made an atomic bomb. And unless Al and Marie can get their act together, its going to destroy Paris, taking some of the greatest scientific minds of the 1906 with it.
As a movie, Young Einstein is nothing earthshattering. But as a comedy, it's great. Jokes are well delivered, and well written. If you can get over the fact that this movie farts right in the face of history, then you should be okay. I mean, nobody holds that against Monty Python.
In the final tally, Serious is a moderately good writer (he's not that good with characters, but his jokes are pretty funny) and a competent director. But he really shines in front of the camera. Serious plays Einstein with a childish kind of naiveté as his character goes from one misadventure to the next, coming up with advanced quantum physics theories as he goes.
Not surprisingly, Al is the only real character here. Marie and Preston barely rise above the level of your average stereotype. And that's okay. No, really, I'll allow it here because the stereotypes work, especially considering the clear cut, almost childish universe in which this movie takes place.
The melodrama is heavy, and the jokes are good for a laugh. Young Einstein is a truly odd little movie, earning its Gs out of sheer creative weirdness. But mostly it was the scene where Al invents Rock n' Roll. That one is priceless.
Gs (out of a possible five)
MOCK O' METER
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