Jenny Slate, Nick Kroll, and Adam Scott Are in a Bizarre (Blind) Love Triangle in My Blind Brother

By Madeleine Davies  |  August 25, 2016 | 5:15pm
Entertainment

Jenny Slate gets reunited with her PubLIZity cohort Nick Kroll and Parks & Recreation co-star Adam Scott in Sophie Goodhart’s My Blind Brother, a film about two brothers and the woman they both fall for.

According to IndieWire, My Blind Brother (which debuted at SXSW and showed this month at the Tribeca Film Festival) “follows Bill (Nick Kroll), a mostly shiftless copy store manager who has long played second fiddle to his overachieving blind brother Robbie (Adam Scott). Robbie has focused his frustrations into a series of increasingly out-there athletic feats, and while Bill is (often literally) running alongside him while he completes his tasks, it’s Robbie who gets all the glory.”

Slate plays Rose, a woman with a life equally sloppy to Bill’s, who tries to help Robbie in order to become a better person.

Goodhart, who originally created My Blind Brother as a short (starring Tony Hale, partially based the film on her own experiences growing up with a disabled sister.

“My sister was diagnosed with MS when I was in my early twenties, and my first reaction was like, ‘This is terrible, and I can’t believe it, and how unfair for her. This is a tragedy,’” she told IndieWire. “Then I realized that forever, for the rest of our lives, she was going to be this kind of amazingly brave, tragic figure, and I was just going to be kind of an indulgent ever-flake.”

It’s a challenging subject, especially for a comedy, and Goodhart admits that the subject is dark and probably not for everybody.

“If I hadn’t had Jenny and Nick playing those characters, it could have seemed really cruel,” she says. “But I never wanted it to be cruel. I wanted them to expose these kind of dark, rather embarrassing qualities about themselves but have us still really like them. They made the tone work.”

 
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