Dinner for Schmucks
Director: Jay Roach
With: Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, Stephanie Szostak, Jemaine Clement, Zach Galifianakis, Lucy Punch, etc.
Where to begin? I know. My memory ain’t what it used to be. I recalled that I wasn’t so fond of the French original, titled The Dinner Game here, but I looked up my 1999 review, and I gave the movie an A-, normally the highest grade I give.
Here are my notes for that review: Wonderfully snide little French comedy, from the director of “La Cage aux Folles.” Smug intelligence defeated by well-meaning idiocy. Plays with our emotions and perceptions for a real purpose. Go see it!
Here is my review for Dinner for Schmucks: Don’t go see it.
The American comedy sensibility is at work here, cheap shots, gross-outs and snide comments washed away by icky sentimentality at the end. That is, the polar opposite of the French film.
Tim (Rudd) is an ambitious munchkin at a high-powered firm, and earns his shot at the corner office by snaring a rich client. The final exam is the “dinner for winners,” an event at the home of the CEO, wherein all the smug jerks who form the corporate management invite someone for everyone else to make fun of. The stupider and more bizarre, the better.
Tim literally runs into Barry (Carell), a bureaucrat with a strange hobby. He finds dead mice, and using taxidermy he stuffs and dresses the little corpses and sets them in tableaux of both historic and personal meaning. In truth, these are the best thing in the movie. The film begins with the construction of one of these, and it was completely captivating. Then, alas, the plot kicked in.
Barry is also a borderline psychopath with no social skills, and once he attaches himself to Tim, Tim’s life heads right for the crapper.
Along the way we meet Darla (Punch), a deranged stalker and sado-masochist who had a one-night stand with Tim and has been plaguing him ever since; Therman (Galifianakis), Barry’s boss at the IRS and a narcissistic dimwit who thinks he can control other people’s minds; and Kieran, a demented photographer even more self-deluded than Therman, and who has a crush on Tim’s girl friend (Szostak).
Got it? Well, at the dinner of the title we learn that there is more humanity among the “freaks” than the pompous butt-holes who invited them. But, then, we knew that the minute we met them.
The only thing that prevents us from wanting to kill Barry is the essential warmth of Steve Carell. If, say, Galifianakis had played this role, we could gladly have watched as Tim boiled him in sulfuric acid.
A very unpleasant and cliched movie, with no redeeming features. Except those little mouse thingies. I would love to have one of those.
D-