Dinner for Schmucks (2010)

Someone at the MPAA must have fallen asleep on the job when they allowed Dinner for Schmucks to go to market with that third word still in the title. For those of you who don’t speak Yiddish, the English translation starts like “Dumb” and ends like “schtICK,” an apt description for this film’s basic premise.

Paul Rudd plays Tim, an ambitious private banker, whose only two goals are to move onto the executive floor and marry his beautiful girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak). After finally gaining the notice of his boss (Bruce Greenwood), Tim gets invited to one of his regular “dinners for winners,” where executive-office dwellers bring the most socially tone-deaf weirdos and idiots they can find over for a little prix fixe ridicule. Tim isn’t immediately comfortable with the idea–especially since sweet art-dealer Julie thinks it’s cruel–but then he meets Barry (Steve Carell).

Bucktoothed Barry is a midlevel bureaucrat–at the IRS, no less–and an amateur taxidermist, passionate about finding dead mice, stuffing them, dressing them in handmade mouse attire, and placing them in dioramas and full-scale tableaux from history, art, and his own (pretty pathetic) personal life. Essentially, this idiot and his “mouseterpieces” are too good for Tim to pass up. Barry is so eager to hang out with his new friend that he shows up at Tim’s apartment a day early for the dinner and, in 24 hours of burgeoning bromance, manages to get Tim dumped, stalked, and audited.

Adapted from Francis Veber’s Le Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game), a French farce with a similar premise, Dinner for Schmucks is not as mean-spirited as it looks. That’s thanks largely to Rudd, who brings much of his own lovable loser je nais c’est quoi (see also I Love You, Man) to this supposedly dickhead role. Barry may have been dumped by his wife for “losing her clitoris” but Tim, who is essentially a poetry-reading, art-loving mensch, is so desperate to get the promotion that he almost loses himself. Who’s the real schmuck?

Having worked together before in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy, Rudd and Carell have unmistakably winning chemistry. Moreover, with his good looks, impeccable comedic instinct, and knack for playing exasperated, Rudd might just be Hollywood’s greatest living straight man. There’s a particularly funny scene where, because of Barry, Tim throws his back out. His attempts to make it up a single step to get his back brace is done with such straight-faced ridiculousness, it brings to mind the earnestness of Dean Martin and Budd Abott in their heyday.

The idiots also help carry this otherwise trifling American adaptation–no small feat since director Jay Roach and screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman don’t offer much for the comedians to work with. The story is safe and trite (defeating the point of the socially transgressive nature of a farce) and the scripted dialogue is meandering and mediocre, at best. Still, Carell, Zach Galifianakis as an IRS higher-up who thinks he’s mastered mind control, and The Flight of the Conchord’s Jermaine Clement as a lecherous, self-important, and very hairy “artiste,” turn the film into a physical-comedy master class.

The dinner scene, which occupies only the final 15 or so minutes of the film, feels largely improvised. That means there are plenty of laughs in Dinner for Schmucks. But, take it from this shiksa, that still doesn’t make it a good movie.