Dinner for Schmucks

I am not the biggest Jay Roach fan. He directed those horribly over rated Meet the Parents movies and was a producer on Bruno and Borat. However, he also directed the 3 Austin Powers movies and the wonderful HBO movie Recount. This leads me to believe that he has nothing to do with my liking or disliking of a movie. I hate Ben Stiller typically and I like Mike Myers typically. It would make sense I hate Meet the Parents and love Austin Powers. With that reasoning Dinner for Schmucks appeared to be a winner for me. I love Paul Rudd and Steve Carrell makes the most out of even the worst scripts. The original trailer was horrid though. It did not make me laugh at all, but the revamped second trailer looked funnier and my concerns were mostly quelled.

Tim(Rudd) is a man who is living a bit above his means. He loves his girlfriend, but when he proposes to her, she needs more time and Tim is not sure he is good enough for her, so he goes after a promotion at work. He is this close to getting the promotion, but he has hit a snag. His boss and the people on the 7th floor (where Tim wants to be) have a gathering once a month where each person has to bring an idiot and the biggest idiot wins a trophy, but the idiots all think they were invited because they are uniquely talented. Enter Barry(Carrell). Barry is the kind of person who only exists in the movies. He takes dead, stuffed rodents and creates these dioramas out of them. he has created The Last Supper, The Mona Lisa and various other works of art. At his house he has a giant landscape of these stuff rodents. Tim knows Barry would be perfect for this dinner, but Tim's girlfriend is dead set against the idea and makes Tim question whether he should. Through a series of very contrived happenstances, Tim and Barry end up spending the entire day together as Tim wonders if his girlfriend is cheating on him with an artist she is curating for. The Artist, Kieran(Jemaine Clement) sort of eases Tim's fears, but Tim has to decide what is more important to him, his job or his girlfriend.

Paul Rudd is hands down the most likable actor working. You just want everything to work for him. Here he is working very hard to make Tim a little bit not likable, but it is so hard to even believe Tim is anything but a good guy. Rudd's Tim has a quality to him that gives him more of an edge than I would have thought, but he is still a basically nice guy. Rudd is very funny as the straight man in most movies, but here he almost has to work overtime to play the straight man because everything else going on round him is so damn wacky. Even he has to resort to the wackiness in a moment of physical hilarity involving some serious back pain. The problem is, you can see him working hard. Rudd is at his best when the jokes, the looks and the attitude come naturally. The script for this movie is, at times, so awful, you can see the sweat forming as Rudd tries to mine the funny out of the source material.

In fact, that is my biggest issue with the whole movie. You can see everyone working. Steve Carrell, Paul Rudd, Zack Galifinakis and Jemaine Clement are all extremely funny people, so for them to get laughs out of me is not a difficult task, and they accomplish it often, especially Clement's brilliantly spacey performance as a performance artist in love with his own animal sexuality. However, you get the feeling that after every take each man was exhausted from trying so hard to make the movie funny. Galifinakis particularly is working very hard. The role is not written in a very funny. It is mostly just mean, but Zack is working overtime to make it funny. It helps that he is playing off of Carrell, who can find the funny in the most unfunny of places. Carrell has made a career out of playing lovable losers and this is no exception, but there is some depth, some sadness and some real pain thrown into this role. There is also some very real joy in watching Carrell light up as Barry starts talking about his creations.

The movie has plenty of misses though. Every scene involving Lucy Punch as a crazy ex-fling of Tim's falls flat in a massive way. The jokes and the physical comedy are just so out there that I cannot buy them. They do not get laughs, they just get looks of bewilderment. I am not sure if the movie needs to have a 2 hour running time, as it starts to burn off the good will with roughly 20 minutes left and because of the hefty running time, by the time we actually get to the dinner I was kind of worn out. The dinner is not as funny as one would hope with the crazy collection of characters, but that embodies the spirit of the movie. They just throw the wackiest stuff possible at you and hope you find it funny. You get a blind fencer, a woman who claims to be a medium for dead animals, a ventriloquist, Carrell and Galifinakis. It is a kitchen sink scenario big time.

Dinner for Schmucks could have been an absolute disaster if done by any other set of actors probably. Somehow the people involved in this make it work. I laughed more than I thought I would and yes, I did roll my eyes more than I thought I would as well. You do get some wonderful comic moments and I do not want to take away from those gems, but you also have to sit through a ton of unfunny stuff. Jay Roach is probably lucky he got this group of men involved because otherwise, it might have turned out to be just as bad as Meet the Parents.

Final Grade: C