The film on which Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks is based, The Dinner Game, ends on a much harsher note than the remake, partly because it’s French, and partly because it manages to make its central idiot, played by Jacques Villeret, a real person. In the American version we get comic superstar du jour Steve Carell. Although Steve Carell is hilarious in this film and occasionally endearing, the role seems like an amalgamation of his previous roles. He’s not unique. He’s almost a robot.
Starring opposite Carell is Paul Rudd playing Tim, a heckuva of a guy who is an analyst striving for a big promotion at a large company. After impressing his superiors with affectations of smarminess, his bosses (Bruce Greenwood, Ron Livingston, and Larry Wilmore) order him to take part in a kind of hazing. He must find an idiot and bring him to dinner Saturday night. They’ll all do the same, and the biggest idiot wins a trophy with the word “Winner” on it. Tim has to step up his game to impress the head boss (Greenwood), who’s a “connoisseur” of fools. Nothing obvious, Livingston warns. No mimes.
Tim finds his fool when he hits Carell’s Barry with his car. Barry turns out to have a strange obsession. He creates miniature dioramas with stuffed mice wearing human clothes. They pose as famous artwork or reenact situations from Barry’s life. Tim finds himself with a real candidate for the “Winner” trophy.
The trouble is that Barry has two types of idiocy: the mice obsession (a talent that is actually impressive and touching in its depictions of his life), and his social incompetency, which is destructive and genuinely annoying. We laugh at him when he fails, and he’s always failing. This is the film’s hypocrisy. The obvious moral that we shouldn’t judge or be mean is completely undercut by the fact that every single joke in this film comes at the expense of the idiots/schmucks/weirdos. The duty then falls on Carell to carry both the humor and the soul of the film. He must make Barry something worth laughing at and rooting for, and we are required to believe that he is the world’s biggest idiot only to turn around and champion his humanity. If the film had only made Barry more intelligent, the lines between idiocy and normalcy could have been blurred, making him a more interesting hero.
In the end, the fact remains that Carell’s Barry is actually a nuisance, oblivious to social cues unless someone is brutally mean to him. It’s hard to feel for him, but by the film’s close, we have had a host of lessons shoved at us telling us that we should. But what really is the takeaway? That nothing matters except love and being nice to weird people? It’s hard to swallow when the only thing enjoyable about the movie is laughing at at the losers. In spite of its schmaltz, Dinner for Schmucks is funny, if you are willing to laugh heartlessly at its fools. Maybe I’m just a schmuck for thinking so.
