What a freak show.
Dinner for Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as an up-and-coming midlevel executive at some sort of financial business. He is in line for a promotion. The catch is that he has to take part in a dinner party where the various invitees, all top level executives in the company, compete as to who can bring the biggest idiot along as a guest. Rudd serendipitously happens upon Barry, played by Steve Carell. Barry’s hobby is taxidermy and he specializes in scavenging mice road-kill and inserting them in the place of humans in intricate dioramas of artistic masterpieces, or as he calls them “mousterpieces.” What an idiot, Rudd thinks, and decides to take him to the party. Now you may be thinking: inviting people to dinner party just to make fun of them. Isn’t that a bit mean? Yes it is, and the movie agrees. So there is a strange dichotomy here. We are presented with a freak show and than asked to empathize with the freaks and dislike the people who laugh at them. As a consequence the movie isn’t as funny as it should be because it suggests that we would be assholes if we thought it was. This movie was based on a French film called, “The Dinner Party.” I heard that one was much meaner than this one. It was probably funnier too. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be nice and funny at the same time. May I suggest a way that this movie could have done exactly that? First though I feel I have to discuss what exactly makes us laugh.
These aren’t my ideas. They are Freud’s and they come from a book aptly titled “Jokes and their Relationship to the Subconscious.” Very good book, I suggest it if you take being funny seriously. I will try to briefly summarize. There are mainly three things that make us laugh. They are Economy, Misdirection, and Aggression.
I’ll skip the first two. What mainly concerns us here is Aggression, or Schadenfreude, the pleasure we get from other people’s misery. We all have aggressive natural instincts. Your boss may be a nice guy, but his pain is easy to laugh at because deep down you are unhappy that you have to take orders from anybody. To some degree we all want autonomy. There doesn’t even have to be an “actual joke” associated with it. If there is a person you feel routinely bullies you and then one day somebody else stands up to them or simply says, “Fuck that guy” behind his back, you would probably feel visceral pleasure and laugh. It is an outlet for the aggression you would normally act upon on if you weren’t suppressing it to say keep your job. The same goes for sex. When a guy calls a woman a slut (or construction dudes catcall) the words are an outlet for sexual aggression. The problem isn’t necessarily that the woman is being sexually active as much as who she’s not being sexually active with, namely the guy who is insulting her. The holy triumvirate of comedy is Religion, Sex, and Politics. Why? Because God, the Government, and Women (or Men) are the main players in the world who are limiting your natural inclination to do whatever the fuck you want.
The problem with this movie is that Barry is completely harmless. There’s absolutely no reason why you would feel intimidated by him. He controls nothing. He doesn’t get the women. He’s a fantastic artist but certainly not somebody you would find yourself in competition with. If he’s funny at all in this movie, it’s because Steve Carell has him say funny things along the levels of Economy or Misdirection. He doesn’t even make you feel guilty for existing. (I bring this up because I’m sure we’ve all heard people rant about homeless people or other unpopular but completely powerless groups. I fear sometimes that people are so hostile because the insulter feels that the simple presence of societal decay on the streets impugns all of society and declares us all guilty. Thus the resentment.) Barry is clueless but not pitiable. He likes his art and is very good at it. Normal people may ostracize him but he is happy in his mind. Thus his solitude is blest and makes it almost impossible to make fun of him. Really, you would have to have some sort of grudge against happy harmless people. (i.e. you would have to be a total asshole.)
Because of this it is perhaps a not so good thing that the movie spends so much time on Barry. It would be better if we spent more time with the odious company executives. They are the type of huge arrogant jerks we all know too well. Two of them are played by Ron Livingstone (Office Space) and Larry Wilmore (The Daily Show). Certainly they are capable of more comedy than what we see here.
The executives should have at least gotten as much character development as the only truly villainous person in the story. That character is Thermen, played by Zach Galifinakis. Thermen works at the IRS (Booo!), stole Barry’s wife (Boo!! Hiss!!), and controls Barry via mind control (Boo- wait what?) Oh what a jerk. Zach’s presence marks the funniest scenes in the movie. It’s a visceral pleasure watching Barry take him down in the climax. There is no reason why the executives couldn’t have been made as ugly as Thermen. You don’t have to give them weird hobbies. Watch or read “American Psycho.” That’s how you go about making fun of rich, good-looking people.
Steve Carell is still pretty funny here but most of the jokes seem to come from non-sequitors and throw-away lines. Here is an example of a particularly good exchange he has with Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) who plays a psychotic modern artist as they sit and overlook a goat ranch:
Clement: Have you ever spent five months living with a herd of goats as one of them?
Barry: No
Clement: That surprises me. The thing about a goat is, it never denies itself what it wants.
Barry: A goat eat'll anything. It could probably eat a bike.
Clement: A goat could eat itself, it was driven to it. I'm just a goat halfway through eating itself.
Barry: Just to be clear, what exactly are we talking about?
Clement: Everything.
Most of the humor in this movie is like that. Paul Rudd essentially plays a straight character. He also has a girlfriend who isn’t funny at all and an assistant, played by very funny Kristen Schall, who is sorely underused. Then there is a psychotic ex-girlfriend who is just too weird to be funny. People need a reason, no matter how tenuous, to be truly crazy. Perhaps they should have made her a religious zeolot on a mission from God, or addicted to LSD, or just a diagnosed schizophrenic. Then she would have made sense and probably would have been funnier. I can’t say I completely recommend this movie, but I am still interested in seeing the French version. So take that for what it’s worth.
p.s. If you go to an AMC movie theater before noon, the movie costs $6. It’s like 1998 student prices all over again!
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