New on DVD: "Dinner for Schmucks," two guys you like playing guys you don't like, but, you know...funny.

Steve Carell, Paul Rudd and Lindsay Lohan's mom...

 

I recently heard the term “overexposed” applied to Steve Carell.

Yes, the dude has a hit TV show (The Office) and two big movies out this year (the brilliant Despicable Me and the film I’m about to review), but I would hardly classify him as someone I’m sick of. If you want to talk overexposed celebrities, we can talk about the way Johnny Depp and Jude Law wouldn’t get out of our faces a few years ago, or we can talk about the way Seth Rogen couldn’t be shrugged off for a while. We can even talk about how sick we all are of Justin Beiber, but in the case of Steve Carell, we’re not dealing with an overexposed star. We’re dealing with a ridiculously talented comedian in extremely high demand due to the aforementioned ridiculous amount of talent.

In Dinner for Schmucks, Carell plays Barry, an odd man with the unusual hobby of making shadowboxes from elaborately stuffed, costumed and posed mice, then photographing them (He calls them “mouseterpieces.”). Paul Rudd plays Tim, a mid-level financier hoping to making it to the top floor of his company by impressing his boss (Bruce Greenwood). To do that, he has to find the perfect candidate to bring to his boss’s monthly “Dinner for Winners,” an elaborate social affair during which rich businessmen pick up morons and invite them to give a presentation of each of their unusual hobbies (other guests at this particular soiree include a blind fencer and a woman who can communicate with dead pets). The “winner” gets a trophy, and if Barry takes it home, Tim gets his promotion, and a chance to really impress his art dealer girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak), who is being wooed by an eccentric artist (Jemaine Clement).

What begins as a chance encounter and an invitation to dinner leads to Barry worming his way into Tim’s life bit by bit, and mucking every bit of it up. But Barry has his own issues, many of them centering around his boss, Therman (Zach Galifiankis), an IRS auditor who wears a cape and believes he can control minds.

Though all the pieces are in place for a raunchy, R-rated comedy, this flick manages to come in at PG-13. The dirty words are still there, but in fewer numbers, and the jokes are much more universal, giving the flick a sense of enjoyment that goes beyond the rapid fire F-bomb fare that’s been so trendy for the past few years. Make no mistake, I’ve got no problem with cursing in movies, but the diminished vulgarity of Dinner for Schmucks, coupled with its somewhat outlandish concept, gives the film the same feeling as an Arsenic and Old Lace style farce from Hollywood’s Golden Age. The side-splitting awkward moments seem to build to a fever pitch, creating a Murphy’s Law kind of feel: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Where the film fails is its plotting. Director Jay Roach (he rocked all three Austin Powers flicks) never drops the comic timing, and the pace is quick, but at times everything seems thrown together. When you’ve got a flick that’s a bit far-fetched in the first place, you have to be extra careful not to get your comic moments too knotted up, because when you do everything begins to feel really, really phony. Dinner for Schmucks isn’t phony, but it seems at times that if it weren’t for the hard work of a great cast, the flick would go over the edge.

Speaking of a great cast, Rudd and Carell have all the makings of a comic dream team. Rudd, who already played a great straight man to foil Jason Segel in I Love You, Man, pulls it off again here, and Carell…well, he’s Steve Carell, he’s always hilarious, but even he reaches further into his own brilliance with Barry. He’s not recycling the antics of the well-intentioned but ill-prepared Michael Scott of The Office, or the out and out bizarreness of his weatherman from Anchorman. This is something entirely new: a character who walks the line between idiocy and profoundly chaotic wisdom, with a lot of heart to boot. But even Carell has to work hard against Clement, who threatens to steal every scene with his rants about the mysteries of the wild and living among goats.

Dinner for Schmucks is not a flawless comic flight, but it’s something different, and something more global, and it’s also very, very funny. We can all relate to feeling like an idiot, and we can definitely all relate to treating someone else like an idiot, then feeling like one ourselves for having acted so superior. Dinner for Schmucks may be outlandish, but it captures those emotions perfectly.

Matt’s Call: This is a film that’s funny to the point of stomach soreness, and it won’t make you feel too guilty about taking some of the older kids along with you. And if that weren’t enough, you get to see a group of comic masters at work on some truly zany characters.