|
 How
deceptive are the first twenty minutes of Dinner for Schmucks?
Truly sneaky in the hopes they raise. A strangely beguiling opening
sequence is filled with charming dioramas of sweet-looking mice dressed
in their Sunday bests, frolicking merrily amongst the miniature swings,
gazebos and rowboats in a romantic park setting.
Such darling homespun
charm gives way to a far harsher reality of a man losing his job as his
colleagues watch, commiserate and speculate with nearly cold-blooded
detachment: What a shame he’s been fired, he shouldn’t have reached so
far, who’s going to be next in line for the departing man’s office?
This last thought is what’s on Tim’s mind. Tired of being one of the
faceless sixth floor worker bees at his financial firm and for the good
of a bright future with his fiancée, the new Porsche and fancy flat that
he can’t quite afford, as well as for the sanity of his snarky,
long-suffering secretary, Tim decides to make his move. During a
meeting where his team is relegated to the Siberia of the board room,
Tim’s raised hand becomes a target of ridicule for the superior seventh
floor alpha-males. After impressing the head of the company with a
brilliantly researched plan to acquire the staggering wealth of a
European multimillionaire, the possibility that Tim will be taking that
recently vacated office becomes a tenuous reality. Of course if it was
as simple as having an idea that would bring the firm boatloads of
capital, everyone would be on the seventh floor and this film would be
much shorter. Instead, as a sort of hazing, each member of the seventh
floor team competes in a cruel game of show and tell; attending a
super-secret dinner at the boss’ palatial mansion, where they will
present the strangest, most bizarre oddball they can find. The weirdoes
are never told why they are there, only displayed, ridiculed and fed
with the wackiest specimen of the evening winning a prize and assuring
the boss’ favour for his escort until the next dinner.
As
this requirement goes against his better nature, Tim does all he can to
get out of the dinner until he literally runs into and over Barry. The
object Barry was retrieving out of the middle of the road, causing their
accident is a deceased rodent in perfect condition for his elaborate
dioramas, or so he explains to Tim. The peculiar Barry seems like an
advent of divine intervention directing Tim to attend the secret
ceremony despite his own better judgment and the objections of his
gallery owner fiancée, who is fending off bad behaviour of her own as a
lusty megalomaniac artist stands in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, under
the pressure of possible career advancement and the thought of winning
his love once and for all, Tim invites the strange little man to the
dinner so that Barry and his precious “mousterpieces” may be made sport
of for fun and prizes. Taking the invitation as a sign that they are
now BFF’s, joined at the hip for the hereafter, Barry’s invasion and
annihilation of his new pal‘s sane, normal existence makes for the most
expensive dinner Tim ever ordered.
As I
mentioned, the first twenty minutes of Dinner for Schmucks holds
promise: An acerbic tale of downtrodden drones versus sharks in a
workplace drowning pool with sharp dialog and whipsmart timing. Had the
entire film stayed put and played on this theme, this movie could easily
have been a winner. It is practically the moment that Steve Carell’s
character Barry enters the picture and more so when he inexplicably
takes over Tim’s life, turning it upside down in a series of truly
stupid situations that the humour fades almost instantly, never to
return.
Midway through, there’s a desperately unfunny, overlong scene
between Barry and his wife-stealing boss who demonstrates his “mind
control” over his gullible employee, followed by a moronic battle for
psychic dominance between the two making finger guns at each other
around the dinner table. It’s painful instances like these that made
Dinner for Schmucks one of the worst films I’ve seen this year. At
least twice I had to be restrained from leaving the cinema out of fear
of my brain bleeding out of the corners of my eyes in pain over what I
was seeing. The film reads like a more lowbrow version of 1996’s The
Cable Guy; an irritating creep insinuating themselves into a random
fellow’s life solely to completely upend it and the guy seems incapable
to getting rid of the harbinger of destruction. I’d be rolling in the
aisle had I never heard of a restraining order, or a taser, or a bat.
Actually, the film closest in comparison to Dinner for Schmucks is last
year’s All About Steve, another alleged comedy and one of the worst
movies I’ve ever seen. Like that agony, another aspect that makes the
lack of funny insufferable is though it’s never stated, it’s abundantly
clear that Barry isn’t just some oddball eccentric; everything about him
reads like a Asperger’s Syndrome sufferer or a victim of autism. His
inability to know when anyone is joking around him, the lack of any
social boundaries, the instantaneous glomping onto Tim as his best
friend ever though they met hours ago after Tim hit him with his car,
the childishness that has him inviting a stalker into Tim’s flat and
allowing her to destroy being worthy of a mere “uh-oh” isn’t just Barry
being ‘off-beat’. Lemon juice on a paper cut is a bugger giggle than
this. There is just too much that Tim endures because of hurricane
Barry and too many far-fetched situations thrown at the moviegoers that
are just plain dumb. It’s a mishmash of unfunny ideas tossed in a
cuisinart and meant to be swallowed by the audience based solely on the
charm of our leads, Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, who are normally both
very funny guys. However, the return of Richard Pryor and George Carlin
from the great beyond could do nothing with this migraine-inducing
garbage.
My
adoration of Paul Rudd has been a deep and abiding thing since 1995’s
Clueless, but after this disaster my esteem has been sorely tested. It
had better be a long time before I see him play another schlubby guy
with a big moral lesson to learn by the film’s end. He should’ve
stopped at 2009’s endlessly superior I Love You, Man and gone out and
played someone like the off-the-wall Kunu from Forgetting Sarah Marshall
{2008}. There’s nothing even Steve Carell’s wealth of comedy
goodness can possibly make of Barry. Do Hollywood studios really need
to be told that laughing at the mentally ill just isn’t funny? Jay
Roach, the person behind the Austin Powers films (Which says nothing
to me at all.) is responsible for this catastrophe and should be
made to sit in a corner and watch movies that make people laugh. Maybe
one of the films he missed was the original 1998 French production this
debacle was based on. I’ve heard the name Zach Galifianakis for a while
now as some rising star on the comedy scene, but I’m withholding my take
on the hype because it’s too unfair to judge any performance here when
the entire film is so awful. The only one who walks away unscathed is
Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement as the sleazy, self-absorbed
artist aiming to seduce Tim’s girlfriend -- and very possibly Tim.
Clement, in far too few scenes gives us a glimpse of what could have
worked in the terrible movie. Ninety minutes of dead mouse dioramas
would have been better entertainment than this.
Throughout the movie, the actual gathering of losers and their guests is
referred to as a “dinner for idiots,” which must be Hollywood code for
the meal this people behind this film intend to make out of the poor
suckers who pay good box-office dough expecting laughs out of Dinner for
Schmucks.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
July
30th, 2010
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