No need to reserve seat at Dinner table

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Of mice and men: Tim (Paul Rudd, left), admires Barry�s (Steve Carell) Last Supper diorama, created with taxidermied rodents.

The table is set. You can smell something cooking. But in Dinner for Schmucks, the comedy never quite makes it from the kitchen to the table.

Pity. And it was a French recipe, too.

The comedy from director Jay Roach (Austin Powers) is an adaptation of Francis Veber's comparatively elegant comedy Le Diner de Cons. Roach and screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman took the simple premise and added lots of extra added ingredients and chunky briskets of good old American star power.

Paul Rudd is Tim, a wage slave at an investment firm attempting to impress his smug, supercilious boss (Bruce Greenwood) with a plan to attract an obscenely rich Swiss millionaire to their firm. Tim succeeds so well, he gets a much-sought invitation to the titular dinner party, where every company man is obliged to bring along some colourful dolt to be privately mocked.

"That's messed up," Tim says. Naturally, he has moral qualms. And naturally, his girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak) strenuously objects. But Tim is anxious to get ahead in business to sweeten the matrimonial deal for the reluctant Julie. Then, like a gift from some sardonic god, Barry (Steve Carell) gets dropped into Tim's lap.

The childlike Barry has dashed into traffic to retrieve a dead mouse for his peculiar hobby, creating exquisite tableaux with stuffed mice. (These pictures, easily the most delightful component of the film, were created by special effects artists the Chiodo Brothers, the puppeteers of Team America.)

The temptation proves too much for Tim. He invites Barry, an IRS accountant, to the dinner party. But Barry arrives to the Saturday night soiree 24 hours early. That's just enough time to destroy Tim's life... accidentally, of course.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with Dinner. Carell, offering up a pathos-tinged variation of dummy weatherman Brick Tamland in Anchorman, is adept at playing the fool. Rudd sticks to his specialty as a kind of sardonic everyman. And the comedy backup arrives in force, including Zach Galifianakis as Barry's "mind-controlling" boss, Lucy Punch as Tim's psychotic stalker ex-girlfriend, and Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement as a priapic performance artist vying for Julie's affection. (Think Matthew Barney as a horndog.)

The movie's heart seems to be in the right place, as Tim is won over by Barry's generous spirit (if not his scintillating conversation).

Of course, there is the irony that the movie's premise puts the audience in the position of those heartless money men; we're only here to get some laughs at the antics of lesser mortals.

Even there, the laughs aren't as abundant as you'd expect.

Blame the cook. Movies directed by Jay Roach benefit more from the performances (Mike Myers in Austin Powers, Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents) than from his talent at structuring comedy. And even with the impressive assemblage of comic talent here, Dinner for Schmucks, while occasionally toothsome, is largely unappetizing.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other voices

Though the premise is deeply cruel, we are supposed to laugh, because we trust that by the closing credits, the characters will have matured into upstanding men.

-- Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek

Steve Carell finds a character more clueless than Michael Scott in broad laffer redeemed by occasional quirks.

-- John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

A bland, summer-sloppy comedy.

-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

There's wonderful rapport between Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, both charming and appealing, which compensates for the softening of the source material (French farce) that was nastier in dissecting manners and mores.

-- Emanuel Levy, emanuellevy.com

The film is sporadically amusing but gives the impression it should be generating more laughs than it does.

-- James Berardinelli, ReelViews

-- Compiled by Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 30, 2010 D4