While flipping through a photo album of his taxidermied mice, Tim (Paul Rudd), right, realizes Barry (Steve Carrell) is the perfect schmuck to bring to dinner.
“Dinner for Schmucks,” a comedy inspired by the more marquee-friendly French film “The Dinner Game,” is fundamentally mixed up and hypocritical in how it presents itself. The affair of the title, which doesn’t arrive until the final act, is a nose-in-the-air gag party for corporate snobs who invite none-the-wiser eccentrics just to snicker at their quirks. The film paints the hosts as bland, closed-minded villains, yet its own humor is precisely rooted in the pea-brained pastime of pointing and laughing at weirdos.
The first is Barry (Steve Carrell), an IRS employee/mouse taxidermist with profound ignorance, clingy creepiness and bizarrely logical backwards wisdom (think The Cable Guy meets Rain Man by way of the 40-Year-Old Virgin). The second is Darla (Lucy Punch), another clinger with a psycho streak and a hooker’s wardrobe. The third is Kieran (Jemaine Clement), an outlandish artist with Russell Brand’s mannerisms and Ace Ventura’s fur-and-feather aesthetic.
All of these capital-C characters are connected to Tim (Paul Rudd), a ladder-climber at a private equity firm whose superiors organize the mean-spirited meal and hinge Tim’s promotion on his ability to scrounge up the biggest loser. Barry is his candidate. Darla and Kieran, meanwhile, are his Internet stalker and the painter working with his curator girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak).
Director Jay Roach gets a great, benevolent-boogeyman performance from Carrell, but his movie is like a two-faced bully: It offers some synthetic sweetener about the values of “extraordinary people,” then turns around and laughs chief oddball Therman (Zach Galifianakis) right out of the room. It expects you to find hilarity in its cheap sideshow jokes, but at the same time declares that, if you do, it’s you who’s the schmuck.
Dinner for Schmucks
PG-13
Two reels out of four
Now playing in area theaters
Date Night
PG-13
Available Tuesday
Want a better date with Carrell? Catch this sweet-natured action comedy in which he and Tina Fey play a suburban couple who get wrapped up with New York criminals and use their domestic habits to get out of trouble. Deep down, it’s a tender valentine to devotion and long-term relationships.
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1. Phyllis Stein-Novack said... on Aug 5, 2010 at 12:25PM
“Like most Yiddish words, schmuck has a number of meanings. According to The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten, schmuck or shmuck, can be obscene as in a certain part of a man's anatomy, or it can mean a dope, a jerk, a fool, a clumsy bumbling fellow, a destestable fellow or a son-of-a bitch. The word is widely used by Jewish males. In other words, it's not a nice word when used in the obscene manner.”