Dinner for Schmucks

City Paper Grade: C

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jul 27, 2010

The blockbuster success of Francis Veber's inane 1998 farce The Dinner Game was nearly impossible to understand given its sub-Benigni brand of humor, but it at least pulled no punches. Jay Roach's remake keeps the premise — a rising exec's choice of guest for a dinner party in which attendees compete to bring the biggest idiot intrudes upon and complicates his life — but almost instantly distances itself from its inherent mean-spiritedness, insistent on preserving the likability of its stars.

Paul Rudd is Tim, an ambitious financial analyst who could clinch a coveted promotion by playing along with boss Bruce Greenwood's cruel games. But no sooner is the subject broached than he begins to feel guilty about it, agreeing only when he literally — and vehicularly — runs into Barry (Steve Carell), whose hobby is creating elaborate dioramas with taxidermied mice.

Naturally, as soon as Barry enters Tim's life, he begins to ruin it, via an avalanching series of miscommunications and slapstick mishaps that reach an almost overwhelmingly obnoxious pitch before Roach mercifully opens up the story beyond Veber's one-set original. In doing so he creates space for a host of wacky character turns from Zach Galifianakis, Little Britain's David Walliams, and Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement, who plays a pretentious artist (typical of the film's overfamiliar tropes) whose blend of outrageous spaciness and amiability is a conscious echo of Russell Brand's Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Interacting with them tempers the manic buffoonery of the usually reliable Carell, whose character combines the delusional naïveté and lack of self-awareness of Michael Scott but dumbs it down to the degree that you want less to laugh at him than find a nice institution that will care for his needs. But Roach tries to have it both ways, asking his audience to both laugh at Barry and to care for him, until it seems that every pratfall is immediately followed by a swell of sentimental strings. Used to dealing with broadly sketched cartoon characters (whether Austin Powers or the Fockers), Roach has a hard time transforming the buck-toothed, shaggy-coiffed Barry into a human being.