Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/11/10
Movie fans like everything
in pairs: be they action heroes, romantic leads or dramatic powerhouses,
we love to watch actors play against each other. But there's no kind
of screen presence we enjoy seeing paired off more than comedians.
The Comedy Team is a long-established stage and screen tradition made up
of some crazy guy (Hope, Lewis, Farley) and his straight man (Crosby, Martin,
Spade), and it's always fun to see how the best at both play against each
other. Among the current crop of movie comedians are two guys who've
quickly risen to rank among my all-time favorites because of not only how
funny they are, but how skillfully they mix that whole “acting” thing into
their comic roles. Steve Carell could well be the most empathetic
doofus in movie history, while Paul Rudd excels at making irritated professionals
likable. It was only a matter of time before somebody put them together,
and Jay Roach's Dinner for Schmucks proves to be a solid vehicle
for what they both do well. The movie's got a lot of laughs, but
its' perverse, cruel concept would almost certainly crash on the runway
without the right actors in the lead roles. And with this duo, Schmucks
is one of the best comedies of the year.
Tim (Paul Rudd) fears his
lack of advancement will become permanent at the investment firm where
he works, compounded by the fact that his art dealer girlfriend Julie (Stephanie
Szostak) is being wooed by famous artist Kieran (Jermain Clement).
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so he breaks protocol
and makes investment overtures to Big Fish client Mueller (David Walliams)
that are well-received by his boss Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood).
There's an open office in the executive suite, and Fender suggests that
it belongs to Tim if he can succeed at two things: help close the
deal with Mueller and impress at Fender's monthly Dinner for Winners.
The dinner is for his top management and up-and-comers, each of whom is
to bring a guest, a “winner” who is the most pathetic imbecile with a “special
talent” he can find. Tim wants nothing to do with it, but he also
wants that promotion, and when he hits Barry (Steve Carrell) with his car,
it seems as though God has dropped a Winner in his lap. Barry's not
very bright, is a lightning rod for disaster, and pursues a unique hobby
creating elaborate dioramas with stuffed mouse corpses. Tim invites
him to the dinner, and from that moment it's like God has instead cursed
him with a plague of Barry. His relationship with Julie is trashed,
a stalker ex (Lucy Punch) gets his address, and he's humiliated in front
of Mueller and his wife. But the chance to salvage his promotion
waits at the Dinner, where all he has to do is set up the most sincere
friend he's ever known to be a laughing stock not only for Fender and his
friends, but for the fellow Winner (Zach Galifianakis) who ruined his life.
I tend to disagree with people
about how funny it is to watch groups of unlikable characters humiliate
each other, which is why I didn't like Roach's megahit Meet the Parents.
And the degree of difficulty in making characters who spend the bulk of
the movie making fools of each other likable is off the charts. But
Dinner
for Schmucks pulls it off quite skillfully, thanks in large part to
its stars. Rudd has the slickness to be believable as a guy who doesn't
want to care and wants to do bad things, but also the ability to mix in
offhanded expressions of guilt and second thoughts that temper the character
without seeming like the screenplay has a Nice Guy gun to his head.
And because he gets nothing but pain, both emotional and physical, out
of Barry's presence in his life from the word Go, it's easier to sympathize
with his lack of sympathy for his new pal. Carrell, on the other
hand, can flash empathetic sadness with the best of them, and since Barry
soldiers on while being so very, very sad, he's able to make just about
anything he does in the name of trying to hang onto his newly minted friendship
seem justified. The two actors, who've worked together before but
never both in leading roles, enjoy sparkling chemistry as their personas
fit like puzzle pieces.
The script (a remake of a
French film called The Dinner Game that sounds like it was quite
different) puts a lot of weight on those dioramas, and a team led by the
Chiodo Brothers (the creators of the Team America puppets and the
filmmakers behind Killer Klowns from Outer Space) has delivered
something really special. Sure, they're kinda goofy, and the movie
hits the fact that the mice are corpses hard, but there's real magic in
the dioramas and the way they're not just art, but art that really springs
from and informs the inner world of the character who created them.
At the dinner party, he puts on his master presentation called The Tower
of Dreams, that includes a lot of fun wordplay from Barry's slippery grasp
of history (“They told the Wright Brothers, 'You can't fly, wood is heavier
than air,' and they said 'No, it isn't'.”) and some really cool designs.
The dinner itself is a show-stopper,
and perfectly walks that line between mocking and celebrating the bizarre
collection of characters Fender's rotten team brings along. There's
no defense for the guy with the inflatable girlfriend, but the blind guy
trying to be an Olympic fencer is a politically incorrect delight.
Galifianakis has risen to fame playing jerks we're supposed to love, but
he's really well-cast here as a villain, a self-proclaimed master mentalist
who engages Barry in a climactic duel of seriously limited brainpower.
Greenwood and Walliams
do great jobs playing to the crowd's hissing like pro wrestlers.
Clement plays the demented artist pretty well, and it's funny to watch
him bond with his fellow artist and idiot Barry, but most of the weird
art sight gags assigned to the character are kinda lame. Szostak
doesn't get to do much of anything but be the Standard Movie Girlfriend,
but Punch does a great job making us as uncomfortable as she makes Tim.
Because it leans so hard
on their skills to work, Dinner for Schmucks will tend to rise and
fall on your opinion of its stars, but then most comedies are that way.
And because I love Rudd and Carrell to pieces, it was a slam dunk for me.
It's not so easy to make a movie this mean also be this humanist, and when
you can make a humanist statement about a woman who communicates with dead
animals (you do NOT want her around when the main course is served...),
you're onto something! |
