Dinner
For Schmucks
Dinner for
Schmucks is one good scene in
search of an entire movie.
Paul Rudd stars as Tim - an analyst at a private equity firm looking to
move up the ladder after one of his co-workers is fired. After a great
deal of hard work and brilliant strategy, he has found a potential new
client that could mean big bucks, so the boss, Lance Fender (Bruce
Greenwood), invites Tim to a special dinner where each invitee brings a
different eccentric personality they can all mock.
The more outrageous the guest Tim brings, the better his chances for a
promotion, so he ends up bringing a guy he almost runs over with his
car, Barry (Steve Carell) - a lonely IRS agent who enjoys making
artistic scenes with stuffed and decorated dead mice.
Director Jay Roach, along with writers David Guion and Michael
Handelman (based on the French film Le
Diner de Cons), are killing time
until the big dinner scene. Throughout Dinner for Schmucks, the
team
tries to establish a relationship between Barry and Tim as the well
intentioned IRS Agent attempts to help Tim and, of course, makes a mess
of everything.
It's supposed to be an ever escalating series of misunderstandings and
goof ups to make Three's
Company jealous, but it derives
the majority of laughs from Jemaine Clement, as the virile, hairy
artist with animal magnetism and insatiable libido, as well as Lucy
Punch as the one time lover of Tim who has been stalking him. The two
of them make much more out of the characters than you might imagine,
and entertain more than Carell and Rudd.
Shockingly, I loved the dinner scene more than I thought. The idea of
mocking people who are different just because they are different isn't
great comedy, but Roach, Guion and Handelman give these oddball
characters some heart, outrageousness that makes them cartoonish in a
good way, and, more importantly, point out how ridiculous and classless
the mockers are in their pursuit of cheap laughs.
Dinner For
Schmucks, which doesn't use the
phrase anywhere in the movie from what I remember, flipped everything
around. They should have started with the dinner, and shown us the
ramifications or future dinners.
Dinner
for Schmucks is rated PG-13 for sequences of crude and sexual content,
some partial nudity and language.
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