When I saw "Dinner For Schmucks" today, the audience was jam-packed and everyone seemed to be having a great time. Box office champion Steve Carrell and his regular second banana, Paul Rudd, along with high-concept comedy director and raunch maestro Jay Roach, combine their trademark sarcastic humor with underlying sensitivity and deep character study, and the result is a crowdpleasing winner.
We take innocent but ambitious career-minded stockbroker Tim Conrad (Rudd)who, during a business meeting, sees one colleague fired for losing money in a stock gamble, and he wants to take his place. His boss Lance Fender (a conniving Bruce Greenwood) lets him on the deal, but on one condition: he must attend his dinner and find himself a willing guest who is so perfectly stupid. He refuses to let his sensible regular companion Julie (Stephanie Szostak) know about this, and this all leads to an on-again off-again relationship. Then Julie hooks up with a strange art curator named Kieran (Jermaine Clement), who likes to paint humans with animals hanging off of their bodies.
Enter Barry Speck (Carell), a dumbed-out IRS employee with glasses and an overbite who has a fetish for dead mice and dresses them up in costumes or his landscapes. The landscapes with the mice reveal Barry's passages in life. Tim accidentally hits him with his car as Barry is about to pick up a dead mouse. Tim takes him and he and Barry develop a love-hate relationship as the unthinking Barry gets Tim into escapes with a blonde SNM stalker named Darla (the appropriately named Lucy Punch. Yes, that's her real name) and fellow IRS employee Thurman (Zach Galifianakis), who wants to rival Barry with his idiotic mind control tactics. Barry and Thurman hate each other so much and Barry's wife left him for Thurman. Also essential to the cast are David Walliams as a Swiss stock client of Tim's and the beautiful big blue-eyed Lucy Davenport as his exotic wife, who in one funny scene, coax Tim into marrying Darla when Julie was unavailable.
Now get to the climactic dinner scene. All the characters and elements build up to the hilarious dinner in a huge mansion where chaos and laughs reign. The humor is funny but the slapstick really is the best at that climax. In the end, Barry gets the top prize against Thurman who wants to outdumb him. All works out everyone predictably in the end.
The best thing about this movie is where the characters appear comfortable with themselves. Barry is content with his idiocy. Tim may be a social climber, but he is good hearted in his personal relationships with Barry and Julie. The rest of the cast play cold-blooded types for good measure, but in the end, all the good guys win.
We take innocent but ambitious career-minded stockbroker Tim Conrad (Rudd)who, during a business meeting, sees one colleague fired for losing money in a stock gamble, and he wants to take his place. His boss Lance Fender (a conniving Bruce Greenwood) lets him on the deal, but on one condition: he must attend his dinner and find himself a willing guest who is so perfectly stupid. He refuses to let his sensible regular companion Julie (Stephanie Szostak) know about this, and this all leads to an on-again off-again relationship. Then Julie hooks up with a strange art curator named Kieran (Jermaine Clement), who likes to paint humans with animals hanging off of their bodies.
Enter Barry Speck (Carell), a dumbed-out IRS employee with glasses and an overbite who has a fetish for dead mice and dresses them up in costumes or his landscapes. The landscapes with the mice reveal Barry's passages in life. Tim accidentally hits him with his car as Barry is about to pick up a dead mouse. Tim takes him and he and Barry develop a love-hate relationship as the unthinking Barry gets Tim into escapes with a blonde SNM stalker named Darla (the appropriately named Lucy Punch. Yes, that's her real name) and fellow IRS employee Thurman (Zach Galifianakis), who wants to rival Barry with his idiotic mind control tactics. Barry and Thurman hate each other so much and Barry's wife left him for Thurman. Also essential to the cast are David Walliams as a Swiss stock client of Tim's and the beautiful big blue-eyed Lucy Davenport as his exotic wife, who in one funny scene, coax Tim into marrying Darla when Julie was unavailable.
Now get to the climactic dinner scene. All the characters and elements build up to the hilarious dinner in a huge mansion where chaos and laughs reign. The humor is funny but the slapstick really is the best at that climax. In the end, Barry gets the top prize against Thurman who wants to outdumb him. All works out everyone predictably in the end.
The best thing about this movie is where the characters appear comfortable with themselves. Barry is content with his idiocy. Tim may be a social climber, but he is good hearted in his personal relationships with Barry and Julie. The rest of the cast play cold-blooded types for good measure, but in the end, all the good guys win.