MasterChugs Theater: ‘Dinner for Schmucks’

Dinner for Schmucks, directed by Jay Roach and based on a 12-year-old French movie known in English as The Dinner Game, is in some ways an exemplary modern Hollywood comedy. It treads a careful boundary between nasty and sweet, balancing the rude humor of humiliation with an affirming, tolerant, almost scolding final message: Be nice! It dabbles in sexual naughtiness without dreaming of going too far into complicated zones of lust and betrayal.

And, most of all, the film collects a cast of performers who know how to be funny. The success of this movie, following a formula upheld by just about any recent hit comedy you can name, lies as much with supporting players and plot-derailing set pieces as with the central story and characters. Jemaine Clement as a pompous, goatish artist; Zach Galifianakis as an I.R.S. flunky who believes he has the power to control other minds; Lucy Punch as a lovestruck stalker with no control over anything: these are the people who propel the movie on its meandering, offbeat path toward a madly farcical climax followed, inevitably and less happily, by a soft and sentimental dénouement.

Tim Conrad, played by Paul Rudd, is sick of his job. Slumming on the sixth floor of his investment firm, he hopes to land an office on the much more fashionable seventh. During his daily meeting, he blurts out an idea involving a rich Swiss magnate and captures his boss’s interest. In order to prove himself, Tim is invited to a monthly dinner where the other members of the office elite get together. Each brings a “special” guest to the meal, and whoever discovers the biggest loser wins the honors. If he can find a true moron, he has a chance of landing that promotion. While his beloved Julie, an art gallery owner, thinks it’s cruel, Tim believes he has found the perfect dolt in government underling Barry Speck, a weirdo who (played by Steve Carell) likes to build dead mouse dioramas. Little does he know that within a scant couple of days, this meek man with a good heart will totally unscramble his life-and give him some much needed perspective. D’awwwwwww.

There is some hypocrisy in the way Barry is treated: you are invited to laugh at him for more than 90 minutes and then implicitly chided for having done so, as the tables are turned, the self-satisfied winners are shown to be the real losers, and Tim’s nice-guy instincts come out on top. The job of finessing this contradiction falls mainly to Carell, who rises to the task by finding a new, or at least newish, way to be at once creepy, endearing, obnoxious and forgiving.

Without this well-meaning, mentally “different” man and his mice-inspired vision, Dinner for Schmucks would be just another abysmal Hollywood attempt at translating a foreign laughfest. And unfortunately, it’s kind of like that. When you walk away from the movie, you may not actually remember the majority of everything that happened. At times, the films’s not a great movie, or even a coherent one, but in nearly every scene it draws laughter from an impressively eclectic array of sources, both obvious and new. People fall down, things break, funny accents are used, crazy misunderstandings occur, and an impressively high number of witty, bizarre and outrageous lines are uttered. It is less a full-scale comic feast than a buffet of amusing snacks, and while it does not necessarily exalt or flatter your intelligence, it doesn’t treat you like an idiot, either. But with Carell’s Barry, it’s great, and he definitely helps that mission of memory.