Film Review: Parts of ‘Dinner For Schmucks’ Better Than Whole

Think back to your high school days, and you’ll likely remember at least one classmate who never quite fit in, even among the nerds and geeks. Someone who just sat in the corner with a book or a journal, letting life pass him or her by.

You likely forgot all about them when they faded out of your thoughts and drifted anonymously into adulthood. But in the uneven yet often incredibly funny new comedy “Dinner for Schmucks,” Steve Carell stars as a guy named Barry – one of those guys who never figured out how to make a friend.

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By revealing both the sad heart of the character and the brashly geeky surface of him, Carell delivers an audacious performance that perhaps ranks as the most varied and entertaining of his movie career and one that even rivals his stellar Emmy-winning turn as Michael Scott on the NBC sitcom “The Office.”

“Schmucks” is based on the 1998 French comedy “Le Dinner de Cons (The Dinner Game)”, and follows the misadventures of a corporate analyst named Tim (Paul Rudd), who wishes for a promotion that will enable him to marry his longtime live-in girlfriend and garner him a coveted move to an upper executives’ floor at his office. Tim has a bold business proposal stolen out from under him at a company meeting, but his boss Lance (Bruce Greenwood in a great, smarmy turn) invites him to a special, secret dinner anyway.

The catch is that if Tim can impress Lance and the other company execs at the dinner, he’ll win the promotion. But the way to press them, he finds, is highly unusual and violates his sense of human decency. The reason? He is to find the biggest loser he can to the dinner as his guest, and have them unwittingly present their most awkward habit as if it were their greatest skill so that the top company honchos can laugh at them. The loser thinks they’ve won a big trophy, and the exec who brought them scores the job of their dreams.

His girlfriend is horrified at the thought of the dinner and orders him not to go through with it. But just as he asks his secretary to tell Lance that he can’t attend the meal, Barry steps in front of his car and the two literally meet by accident. Tim pretends to be friendly to Barry, and Barry believes he’s made his first friend in years.

Since Barry’s biggest skill is his ability to make artistic “mousterpieces” – dioramas featuring dead mice that he taxidermies, clothes and places into settings based on famous paintings, including Leonardo di Vinci’s “The Last Supper” – he just might win, if he can beat his worst rival: his own boss at the IRS (Zach Galifianakis in a ridiculously funny performance), who has tormented Barry for years with his alleged ability to control Barry’s mind.

Now that I’ve lavished praise upon Carell, Galifianakis and Greenwood, and spelled out the film’s utterly bizarre premise, one might wonder, “So what’s the problem?” The film’s pacing is off in some places, a fact that’s surprising given the fact that director Jay Roach was at the helm of five of the biggest screwball-comedy hits of the past 30 years with the “Austin Powers” trilogy and the first two “Meet the Parents” films.

The film lumbers at points in its first half-hour, and occasionally feels like it’s trying way too hard with the wacky antics at other points in the rest of the film. Yet enough moments work – including a freakishly funny subplot involving a stalker (Lucy Punch) of Tim’s – that you likely won’t be able to keep from laughing loudly and thinking back on the film as being better than the sum of its parts.

“Schmucks” is surprisingly free of profanity (or at least nearly enough so that I didn’t notice any), but in keeping with Roach’s other films, there are some outrageously risque sequences. While there’s nothing graphic in the visuals, some of the verbal jokes’ topics carry things pretty far out, yet for adults and teenagers, these situations are also absurd they’re nearly impossible to take serious offense at and the film’s overall sweetness and humanity still rules the day.

And thanks to an absolutely beautiful use of wistful pop classics like The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” it is also the rare broad comedy film that manages to get its emotional moments right as well. You’ll be glad you RSVP’d to this film, rather than feeling like a schmuck for paying to see it.