Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/1/11
The star rating system can
be a bit of a pain in the case of movies I enjoy but do not recommend.
I ultimately feel like the star rating should reflect the quality of my
own experience rather than the folly of my trying to guess yours, but I
tell you up front to tread very lightly when pondering purchasing a ticket
for The Dilemma, an astonishing twenty-car pileup of a movie that
suggests a studio executive wandered onto the set of a thoughtful indie
drama Ron Howard was making with a couple of cast-against-type comedians
and suggested all funding would be pulled if the thing were not “funnied-up”
at once! At its best, The Dilemma is a really great story
about a man who makes one bad decision after another under the weight of
his inability to read the fine print in the implied social contracts that
make up his life. At its worst, it's embarrassingly bad, an utterly
unfunny train wreck whose stars don't even seem to know their material
reads on the page as jokes. When allowed to, Vince Vaughn and Kevin
James add skillful depth to their usual comic personas, Jennifer Connelly
is utterly luminous as Vaughn's conflicted girlfriend, and Channing Tatum
delivers one of those great character role performances that make you wonder
why he isn't a better leading man. I was astonished by the tone deafness
of much of what goes on here given that an Oscar-winner is behind the camera,
but ultimately what works about The Dilemma outweighed its multitude
of bizarre flaws for me. Caveat Friggin Emptor.
Ronny (Vince Vaughn) and
Nick (Kevin James) have been best friends since college and now they run
a business designing special features for auto manufacturers. Nick's
the engineer, Ronny the salesman, and they've got quite a product to pitch
to Ford: a hybrid engine that makes the same kind of pulse-quickening
noises its gas-guzzling counterpart does. They get the contract,
but there are still bugs to be worked out in the design and Susan Warner
(Queen Latifah) is assigned to oversee the project. This should be
the best time in their lives: Ronny's girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly)
stuck with him through the darkness of a gambling addiction and he's ready
to propose and Nick and his wife Geneva (Winnona Ryder) have been happily
married for years. At least, that's what Ronny thought. When
scoping out possible locations for his “perfect” proposal, he sees Geneva
making out with Zip (Channing Tatum), a younger guy who's definitely not
her husband. He confronts her and is a bit shaken up by her response,
that the marriage he considered an inspiration is a loveless farce and
Nick sneaks out to a “massage parlor” for quickies on the side himself.
So he agrees to give her time to break the news to his best friend in her
own way. But when she drags her heels and he threatens to reveal
the truth again, she goes on the offensive. She and Ronny had slept
together before she met Nick, and they'd always kept that a secret for
fear it would put a strain on their friendship. Now she suggests
she'll use that information to add validity to a story that Ronny made
a move on her and when she rebuffed him, he made up this affair for revenge.
Needing proof, he starts stalking Zip with a camera and his erratic behavior,
along with the large wad of bills intended to buy that wedding ring he
doesn't want her to know about yet, arouse Beth's suspicions. As
the engine project falls farther and farther behind schedule, Nick and
Ronny's fraying friendship makes any secret harder and harder to reveal,
and the longer he goes without telling the truth, the harder it gets to
explain the reasons why he waited. Ronny Valentine is in a lot of
trouble.
Writer Alan Loeb has constructed
a really nice box in which to place his protagonist: the dilemma
of the title is all about wanting to do the right thing without sacrificing
any of three relationships Ronny really values, and the fact that the window
of opportunity to do so slams shut before he's even really thought his
situation through. There's simply no way Geneva won't view him telling
the truth as a betrayal, no way Nick won't hate him for telling the truth
or hiding it, and no way to have that fairy tale proposal to Beth once
she's already started to fear he's fallen off the wagon. And his
inability to simply let these things go and face the consequences of his
own dumb luck in seeing that kiss makes for a first-rate ethical thriller.
Vaughn is the perfect guy for this material, all likable and gregarious
on the outside and chilly and socially stunted on the inside. Connelly,
who won her Oscar under Howard's direction, really shines showing us why
she sticks it out but also how hard it is to be in a relationship with
a recovering addict. James and Ryder are both just a tad darker than
we expect, always keeping us just enough off-balance about how they'd react
to Ronny telling the truth that we can understand why he just keeps sinking
deeper and deeper into the hole not telling it digs for him.
But, alas, The Dilemma
also thinks it's a comedy.
Laughs are in short supply,
to say the least, but the movie keeps swinging. Vaughn and James
are good at selling a joke, but their material is pretty lame. But
at least they fare better than Latifah, who takes such a horrifyingly misguided
approach to a role that probably wouldn't be funny no matter who played
it that I squirmed every moment she's on screen. And there are these
desperate, DESPERATE cutaways to things like simulations of Ronny's lies
and, yes, The Donner Party, that don't hold together with anything else
we see, have no internal consistency and are never close to eliciting a
single laugh. More troubling still, none of them contain the movie's
stars, making it highly likely they were shot and inserted after the movie
wrapped in a foolhearty attempt to tip this tonally uneven production back
toward the comedy the studio knew it would be trying to sell. I don't
really know what to say about a really bizarre scene featured prominently
in the trailer where Ronny gives the worst toast humanly possible at Beth's
parents' anniversary celebration. On paper, there's a lot of funny
stuff there, but Vaughn and Connelly play the scene like the Long, Dark
Night of Ronny's soul and it really adds fuel to the notion that nobody
here knew what kind of movie they were trying to make. Just about
the only performer who's consistently fun is Tatum, whose dimwitted thug
act proves surprisingly effective.
There's a lot of good food
for thought in The Dilemma, and pieces of a really good movie are
laying all over the place. Unfortunately, pieces of a truly awful
one are laying right next to them, so it's a pretty formidable test of
whether you're a half-full or half-empty kind of viewer. Color me
the former: I'm glad I saw it. But don't confuse that with
me recommending you do the same. |
