Messed Up

In Steve Carell’s first few episodes of the American version of The Office, his character, Michael Scott, hewed closely to the template created by the series’ British mastermind, Ricky Gervais. Scott, like David Brent before him, was cruel and obtuse, a nightmare of a boss who thinks he’s a leader of men.

But in the United States, audiences didn’t take to so bleak a comic vision, and soon, Michael Scott was transformed from a monster into a genial buffoon — a lovable, lovelorn doofus who may behave badly at times but whose heart is generally in the right place. The tone of the series evolved from harsh satire to affectionate, gentle comedy. Ratings success ensued. That’s a lesson well learned by the filmmakers behind Carell’s new movie, Dinner for Schmucks, an American reworking of the 1998 French comedy Le Dîner de Cons.

Francis Veber’s original, a short, sharp comedy of manners, was ostensibly about a weekly dinner party to which wealthy businessmen bring carefully selected idiots.

But, in fact, the movie never makes it to the dinner party in its eighty minutes. Instead, it punishes its ostensible protagonist — a jerk of a book editor who revels in the delights of the dinner with idiots — with an escalating series of indignities and tortures, most of them innocently perpetuated by his moron for the night. That is to say, for all the fun poked at short, goony François Pignon (Jacques Villeret) — who makes maquettes of world landmarks out of matchsticks — the film hates his asshole tormentor so much that it is fundamentally on the side of the idiots.

Not so Dinner for Schmucks, directed by Jay Roach, which takes the snobbish, cruel editor of the original and turns him into Paul Rudd, the nicest young man you’re ever likely to meet. Rudd plays Tim, an analyst at a private-equity firm who is only gunning for a corner office to convince his girlfriend that he’s marriage material. “That’s messed up,” Tim says, upon hearing about the dinner for schmucks, and he’d never do it if he wasn’t forced into it by circumstance. He quotes Baudelaire, for goodness’ sake!

Meanwhile, windbreaker-wearing Barry (Carell) — the schmuck in question — is not just an unctuous bumbler like François Pignon, but is, in fact, borderline mentally disabled. That is the only conclusion I can reach after watching credulous Barry: 1) admit that he has no idea what a clitoris is;

2) take the admonition “Don’t leave that chair” so seriously that he carries the chair with him wherever he goes; and 3) gleefully smash bottles of wine against the walls of Tim’s apartment. The only thing he is good at is making intricate little dioramas out of taxidermied mice — dioramas that are, thanks to this film’s impeccable technical credentials, so lovely and miraculous that you don’t understand why everyone in the movie thinks they’re so stupid.

Dinner for Schmucks is funny, sure. How can it not be, with good comic actors like Carell and Rudd—plus Zach Galifianakis, Jemaine Clement, Kristen Schaal and Ron Livingston? (Stephanie Szostak, who plays Tim’s girlfriend, isn’t funny at all, but don’t worry: She’s extremely pretty.) Even if some bits fall fl at—the carnivorous ex-flame of Tim’s played by Lucy Punch, for example, is aggressively unfunny—any movie starring that many talented comedians, knitted of the funniest stuff in a reported 900,000 feet of film, is bound to have its share of laughs.

And rest assured, no American comedy is going to call itself Dinner for Schmucks without showing us the actual dinner for schmucks, which is, naturally, this movie’s comic apogee. There’s a blind fencer, and a ventriloquist who’s married to a slutty dummy, and a guy who French-kisses his vulture. They’re all idiots, or possibly mentally ill. Paramount Pictures and director Jay Roach would like to invite you to a dinner they’re hosting, at which you are welcome to laugh at these poor jerks.

That’s a little messed up.

BY DAN KOIS

Red Bull

Alain Resnais’s Wild Grass has plenty of fans — it copped an award at Cannes in 2009 — but I don’t see what they see.The 87-year-old filmmaker’s latest is an insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.

Adapted from a novel by Christian Gailly, Wild Grass is meant to be a madcap meditation on l’amour fou.Georges (Resnais regular André Dussollier) finds a bright-red wallet stolen from Marguerite (Sabine Azéma, the director’s reliably irritating muse). A middle-aged man with a suburban chateau and a beautiful, adoring wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny), Georges has an active fantasy life with a sense of indignation to match; he becomes fixated to the point of stalking the mysterious Marguerite, who was delivered to him by chance. Especially as played by Azéma, she is a fanciful creature — a maladroit dentist and a weekend aviatrix.

Marguerite initially rebuffs and then pursues her admirer in a tedious dance of attraction-avoidance scarcely relieved by the movie’s fatuously self-mocking narrator and full panoply of coy narrative tricks, largely drawn from Gailly. No question that Wild Grass is a literary conceit: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is drafted as an inter-title to explicate the chaste passion of Georges and Marguerite, and a copy of Philip Roth’s geriatric fantasy romance Exit Ghost is a carefully planted clue to Suzanne’s infinite tolerance for her husband’s nonsense. That she treats cantankerously daft Georges as a child contributes to the movie’s surreal chronology: Played by a 65-year-old actor, Georges is described as looking fifty, married for thirty years to a woman who could hardly have been ten when the knot was tied.

Irrationality rules right down to the elaborate series of Freudian puns that set up the self-congratulatory non sequitur ending. Still, Suzanne’s acceptance of Georges’s foibles and his passion for Marguerite pale beside Resnais’s devotion to the actress who plays the role. Her hoarse quaver is extolled in the movie as uniquely charming; her mangy orange bouffant hairdo, less quirky than wildly unflattering, suggests a roadshow production of The Lion King. (By contrast to this rampant spryness, the younger actors — Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, who plays a cop, and Emmanuelle Devos, the partner in Azéma’s practice — are blessedly impassive.)

Despite a soundtrack alternating between blowzy faux jazz and John Williams earwax, the movie is marginally less dreadful than the last half-dozen mash notes Resnais has produced for Azéma over the past quarter-century. But Wild Grass remains true to the arc of the filmmaker’s career. During the period of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais was burdened by undue solemnity; beginning with Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), he executed an about-face and turned solemnly antic. Once upon a time, Resnais’s heavy-handed themes were mitigated by his adroit editing. Wild Grass is a montage film, as well, and with its skillful integration of high angles, slow motion and mega-closeups it’s possible to watch it as an exercise — but only up to a point.