Tasty ‘Dinner’ serves up big laughs

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In the new comedy, “Dinner for Schmucks,” Steve Carell plays a simpleton who spends his days making intricate dioramas where dead mice are stuffed and posed as the central characters. Courtesy photo

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July 29, 2010

Sean McBride The Port Arthur News The Port Arthur News Thu Jul 29, 2010, 09:54 AM CDT

PORT ARTHUR — In the new comedy, “Dinner for Schmucks,” Steve Carell plays a simpleton who spends his days making intricate dioramas where dead mice are stuffed and posed as the central characters. The mice are cute and clean, and not at all like the vermin that one might find in the streets. The film follows the same formula with regard to its comedy, opting for cute and clean jokes that benignly tickle rather than those that assault our senses head on.

Normally, I'm a fan of harder-edged comedies, but I will freely admit that not only did I love the soft humor of “Dinner for Schmucks,” but I also laughed as much at this film as I did any other in recent memory. It's not as memorable as some of those harder comedies, but the humor is more genuine, and the laughs are certainly well deserved.

Paul Rudd plays Tim, a financial advisor eyeing a promotion at his firm. In order to get the job, he has to pass one final test. He must find a complete idiot and bring him to a company dinner where his boss and the other executives will make fun of the assembled idiots. As the film is quick to admit, “it's messed up.”

Steve Carell plays Tim's idiot, Barry, and it's one of his best performances yet. He's a man who lost his wife to a co-worker (Zach Galifianakis) and now stumbles through life, so hopeless that you'll sympathize with his plight even as you roll your eyes at his imbecility. What's worse, despite his desire to do good, Barry is a master of destruction. Within hours of meeting Tim, Barry has ruined his love life, wrecked his apartment, put his job in jeopardy, gets him audited by the IRS and invites a clearly crazy stalker over for a night of mayhem.

Throughout it all, you can't help but to like the guy.

Carell is in top form here, but the supporting cast is also superb. From Galifianakis' IRS agent who thinks he has the ability to control minds, to Jermaine Clement, playing a pretentious and over-sexed artist, to Lucy Punch, as the crazed stalker, each one of these characters adds another layer of weirdness to the proceedings. The film is genuinely funny; these characters are just extra funny icing on the cake.

As always, the litmus test for any comedy is the laughter, and I laughed non-stop at “Dinner for Schmucks.” Okay, so the film takes a while to get rolling, and Tim's romantic subplot seems like an afterthought, but the bottom line is that if you're looking for dinner and a movie, I suggest that you try dinner and a “Dinner.”

Movie reviews by Sean, “The Movie Guy,” are published bi-weekly in “The Port Arthur News” and seen weekly on KFDM-TV and KBOI 2-TV. Sean welcomes your comments via email at smcbride@kboi2.com.

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