Dinner For Schmucks

Dinner for Schmucks is based on a French film called, Le diner de cons by Francis Veber.  From what I hear this version was actually a little meaner and more cold-hearted, but I haven’t seen it.  I’m not here to compare the two at all; I’m here to review the American version with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd.  Just thought I’d let you know that you won’t have to sit through some pretentious bullshit about watered-down remakes and how they’re the end of cinema as we know it.

The movie centers on Tim (Paul Rudd) who is a sort of a go-getter in his company that dismantles distressed businesses and cannibalizes them.  He wants to move up desperately to impress his fiancé, Julie (the ridiculously beautiful Stephanie Szostak) and a recent employee’s firing is his chance at getting a better position.  Julie is a curator who is currently affiliated with a high profile and certifiable nutbag artist,  Kieran (Flight of the Conchord’s Jermaine Clement) so naturally Tim feels a little inadequate when it comes to how cool and important his job is.

Tim’s boss (Bruce Greenwood) offers him the vacant position after he kicks ass in an important meeting, but with the offer there is a catch.  In order for Tim to solidify his upgrade, he will need to attend a ‘dinner for idiots’ as they say.  This dinner is attended by all the heavy hitters in the company and is an event where they each bring their own ‘extraordinary’ person for a sick competition.  The person with the most outrageously stupid guest wins the night so to speak.

This is where Steve Carell’s Barry character comes into play.  Barry is a shade above Brick Tamlin from Anchorman, and just a couple notches below Michael Scott from The Office on the idiot spectrum.  He’s an IRS agent, and in his spare time he creates insanely detailed diaoramas of everyday activities/famous events populated entirely by stuffed, dead mice.   The plot is set into motion once Tim hits Barry with his Porsche.  From there, we have an hour and 45 minutes of the two of them playing off each other ending with the payoff that is the dinner for schmucks.  The film focuses mainly on Tim’s girl/work troubles but there is a sub-plot involving Barry’s own issues with his wife leaving him for his co-worker Thurman played by Zach Galifianakis.  Zach Galifianakis is again playing an intensely weird character and just his mere presence on the screen is enough to tighten my pants.

Love him or hate him, it’s Steve Carell that makes this movie work.  By no means is Dinner for Schmucks reinventing the wheel of comedy, but it certainly offers up something that I think is totally adequate as far as summer comedies go.  Not every joke works, and the crazy artist played by Jermaine Clement is not as funny as he thought he was, but I laughed out loud a lot in this movie.  Paul Rudd is perfect playing the straight man to Carell’s dipshit loser with the heart of gold, and despite what I kept hearing prior to seeing this movie, the chemistry between the two is fine.  The movie didn’t really have a great trailer and I think that’s hurt the opinion of it to be honest.  Thankfully I think the reason the trailer wasn’t that great was because they kindly held back all the best and funniest gags.

There’s some stuff involving a stalker of Tim’s character that while funny, I think was really just an attempt to pad the film out a bit.  It was certainly humorous, but there was just a little too much of it in one scene in particularly that I won’t spoil.   The crazy artist that Jermaine Clement played was also just not quite hitting the right notes with me.  It seems as if they almost wanted Russell Brand to be this character, but couldn’t land him so they settled on Jermaine.  Jermaine is hilarious on Flight of the Conchords, but here he’s just sort of a guy who has his moments but is trying just a bit too hard in a lot of his scenes.

I cannot emphasize enough about how great Steve Carell is.  The man plays stupid so well, and somehow is able to pull off different levels of it with all of the various characters he’s played over the course of his career.   He’s a talented dude and he is the reason that you will come out of this movie enjoying it.  Of course where he really shines, is when the movie hits the dinner scene at the end.  I’m not going to spoil anything from it because it’s got some of the best gags in the film, but rest assured it’s ridiculous and funny and you will never think of pudding the same way again thanks to Zach Galifianakis.

So go see this thing.  Ignore the tomatometer, tell Ebert to suck it and just go check it out and have some fun.  If you’re a hardcore Carell fan?  Then you’re going to score.  If you’re not?  Give it a shot anyway and you might be surprised how much you liked it.

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