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Brody stars as Steven, a sadsack office worker who still lives at home with his parents. He longs to be a ventriloquist. One day he accepts his own ambition and goes out to buy a ventriloquist's dummy. It's very weird, and people make fun of him accordingly. The little wooden lad on his knee soon becomes a sort of alter ego, making fun of our shy hero as part of his own ventriloquism shtick and helping him come out of his shell in real life.
Steven has a best friend in a punk wannabe neighbour, a tough savage played with great flair by Milla Jovovich. As Fangora, Jovovich gets to display large amounts of loyalty and anger. She offers Steven romantic advice, for example, that almost lands him in jail.
(Vera Farmiga plays the object of Steven's desire -- a single mother who works at the employment office.)
Then there's Steven's sister (Illeana Douglas), a wedding planner who really longs to be a singer. As she has recently broken off her own engagement, she too lives at home.
And living at home involves Mom and Dad (Jessica Walter and Ron Leibman), who are strongly passive-aggressive and mildly nuts, in that parental way.
Dummy is a small, quirky film about regular people trying to realize their dreams against all the odds. It's also a film about just what constitutes adult life, but it's too smart to try to offer Big, Important Answers. The characters are all strangely endearing, and the real pleasure of the movie is just watching them interact.
Dummy pulls itself into a too-neat, too-sitcom type of ending, but does not wreck all that went before in so doing. And Brody gets to prove here that he can make audiences laugh just as well as he made them cry in past screen outings.
(This film is rated 14-A)