Directed by: Jay Roach
Starring: Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, Jermaine Clement
Rating: PG-13

Steve Carell and Paul Rudd star in Dinner for Schmucks. (Courtesy photo)

As a preamble to my first official movie review, I’d like to acknowledge the 17 years of reviewing Alex Manugian has provided for the Harvard community by saying, simply: I have some large shoes to fill. Suddenly, here I am, taking over for someone who started writing movie reviews when I was still in diapers.

I certainly don’t consider myself an expert on movies, or even a smart viewer—I loved the 1985 mystery-comedy Clue, but I was mostly indifferent to The Godfather—but I am a writer and an actor, and, knowing what it is to attempt to do both for a camera, I can appreciate someone who does them well. As anyone who knows me will acknowledge, I also like a good joke. So it was fitting to step into the world of movie reviewing with a farce like Dinner for Schmucks.

Jay Roach, the man behind the Austin Powers movies, has made another satisfying comedy, again allowing us to laugh without shame at utter stupidity. With Austin Powers we laughed at a 1960s soul stuck in a 1990s body; in Dinner for Schmucks it’s a dowdy Steve Carell who bumbles and babbles and breaks most everything in his path.

Tim Conrad (Paul Rudd) wants the big promotion at work so his girlfriend will marry him. To get promoted, he has to participate in his boss’ so-called “Dinner for Winners”—–meaning he’ll have to find an idiot guest that out-buffoons all his coworkers’ guests. In comes Barry Speck (Carell), an IRS worker with a taxidermy hobby that would give Stuart Little nightmares—in short, the perfect idiot for the dinner. A comedy of errors ensues as Barry accidentally makes Tim’s girlfriend believe he’s cheating, destroys much of Tim’s swanky apartment, makes a fool of Tim in front of a potential client, and gets Tim audited by his IRS coworker, the mind-controlling nemesis Therman Murch (Zach Galifianakis). Meanwhile, the love of Tim’s life is running away with an animal freak of an artist, Kieran Vollard (Jermaine Clement). By the time we reach the titular dinner, much of Tim’s life is in ruins and Barry is starting to confront his own messy personal life, leading to a sweet display of affection between the two—partly in the form of dioramas of stuffed mice. We’re left wondering, as we should be, who the real schmucks are.

The movie is based on a French film which is supposedly better (I haven’t seen it) and so has received a fair amount of harsh criticism—about sloppy editing, about too many subplots, about too many over-the-top characters. However, editing criticisms aside, I think the absurdity of the movie is where it gets its charm. The writing does exactly what it needs to do—move the plot along and make jokes so we don’t get bored (and we would get bored if the jokes weren’t there). We constantly wonder, how can Tim’s life get any worse? And when it gets worse, we laugh at his pain, knowing full well that everything will work out eventually, because Barry is too good a friend to let him suffer, right?

Most of the fun in this movie lies in the extremes to which the actors go as their characters. The best part is that we can tell they’re having fun too. Galifianakis and Clement, as woman-stealing fiends, are the most entertaining, as they are the ones who really get Carell’s and Rudd’s goats, so to speak. Rudd, for his part, does what he can with another straight-man role and bland straight-man dialogue. Luckily, Barry follows up just about every line of Tim’s with a laugh line, so we never dwell for long on how the screenwriters wrote Tim’s part almost as an afterthought.

The important thing about Dinner for Schmucks—and for this I applaud Roach and the cast—is that it does not feel cheap. The ads I’ve seen don’t do the movie justice. They make it seem like another Judd-Apatow-esque romp, maybe without all the vulgarity. Instead, it’s a sweet movie with darling morons—and more raunchiness than you were expecting. It isn’t an extraordinary or intelligent movie, but I certainly didn’t leave feeling like an idiot.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School, where he was a member of the Drama Society. He is bound for the University of Pennsylvania this fall.