Features > Movie Reviews > Dinner for Schmucks…

Francis Veber’s 1998 French hit came under the more robust title, Diner de Cons (you’ll have to look it up). Barry (Steve Carell) may be a schmuck, but I’d call him a dweeb. He’s an anorak, a geek whose hobby is crafting intricate dioramas featuring stuffed mice dressed as men and women. Some would call him an artist.

When he isn’t fashioning rodents into simulacra of The Last Supper, Barry works for the IRS, where he’s under the thumb of a very strange, rather sinister supervisor by the name of Therman (Zach Galifianakis), who exerts control over Barry’s mind. It’s amazing that he can even locate one.

Run over by a rising finance company executive, Tim (Paul Rudd), Barry immediately jumps to the conclusion that he is the one liable for damages. To compound his confusion, Tim winds up inviting Barry to dinner – though he doesn’t tell him the real reason. See, Tim is on the verge of a promotion, and to clinch the deal, his boss has invited him to participate in a monthly ritual in which the firm’s top executives compete to bring along the biggest bozo – the dumbest, most misguided, inadvertently funny schmuck. With Barry, Tim can hardly fail.

What he doesn’t reckon on, and the great equalizer in this apparently misanthropic set up, is the disasters that Barry inadvertently brings down on his new ‘friend’.

The French original, which was meaner and funnier, made no bones about implicating its smugly superior businessman in the cruelty of the prank. The American version can’t bring itself to be so ruthless: Rudd’s guilty misgivings kick in early and often (he’s no Walter Matthau, not even a Bill Murray). “There is the me you know and love,” he explains to his appalled girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak). “Then there is the other me you don’t know and would not like. I don’t like him either, but we need him to pay for this apartment…”

That’s an elegant and witty rationale that plays to Rudd’s comedic strengths – cynicism and moral compromise rather than outright amorality – but it may also be a tactical error. Wouldn’t we laugh harder at the disasters Barry inadvertently brings down on Tim if he really deserved them?

Directed by Jay Roach in a manner that suggests he has no pressing engagements elsewhere, Dinner for Schmucks finds ample room at the table for numerous out-there comic turns from Flight of the Conchords star Jermaine Clement (as a narcissistic artist), and David Walliams (as an aristocratic Swiss billionaire). Lucy Punch is a scream as the angriest stalker since Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and Kristen Schaal is terrific in a small part as Tim’s ambitious secretary. And I haven’t even mentioned the blind Olympic fencer (Chris O’Dowd), the ventriloquist with a trampy doll, or the pet spiritualist…

It’s a veritable comedy smorgasbord! But you might feel queasy after. Some of this material would have looked better on the DVD supplements menu. Roach’s inclusivity is meant to distract us from the problem that the central dynamic between Carell and Rudd doesn’t quite click.

They have some funny scenes together, and it’s good to see Rudd doing some physical slapstick for a change, but Carell’s toothy eager-beaver nincompoop feels more like a stunt than a fully-fledged human being, and it’s disappointing that Roach shies away from anything genuinely awkward and uncomfortable in favor of broad caricature and tepid sentimentality. Which is not to say there aren’t some good laughs here to ease you through a Saturday night with nothing on the telly.