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. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Dinner for Schmucks’