Review of Dinner for Schmucks (2010) by Chads — 02 Aug 2010

Nobody likes to see a good person being treated like a schmuck. In Nancy Savoca's "Dogfight", the waitress is the schmuck, a shy woman, treated so by a marine, a coffee shop customer she follows to a bar, where Rose(Lili Taylor) unwittingly enters an anti-beauty contest, a pageant no woman ever dreams of winning.

The IRS agent is the schmuck; the IRS agent-cum-taxidermist in "Dinner for Schmucks", who gets invited to a schmuck-fight by an up-and-coming businessman; a schmuck-fight that should make the moviegoer cringe, but doesn't.

While it would be wrong to equate mice with Chinese dissidents, the same ethical questions come into play surrounding Barry's artwork, the same questions that plague the people responsible for Bodies.

..The Exhibiition. Lost in the artistry of the taxidermist's furry installations is that little matter concerning taste: Is it in bad taste to engage the dead with an aesthetic eye? And are Barry's tableaus, murder tableaus? When Tim(Paul Rudd) first bumps, literally bumps into Barry(Steve Carrell), the automobilist interrupts the mouse artist's process of obtaining his next carcass; a found object, presumably, cause of death unknown.

"Dinner for Schmucks" never answers the question as to how Barry collects his subjects. Imagine the same installations, but with kittens, or puppies, then you get the idea. Contrary to Francis Veber's "Le diner de cons", in which the French schmuck is wholly sympathetic(no animals are harmed; he works with matchsticks), and schmuck's friend, undoubtedly a lout, who preys on the social misfit, this American retelling blurs the protagonist/antagonist binary(Rudd plays Barry with a dose of humanity).

If Barry's rodents perished via means of corporal punishment, maybe there's a self-awareness to the taxidermist's naivety, the hustled playing the hustler, which lends a considerable edge to the farcical misunderstandings that temporarily dismantles Tim's personal and business relations.

After all, Barry is a taxman with the power to audit; he can destroy Tim's life on purpose. The mice are adorable, but like the bodies in the controversial art exhibit that continues to tour the world, the dead rodents and human beings respectively, are victims of degradation; post-mortally humiliated by aesthetes.

"Dinner for Schmucks" is more ambiguous than most mainstream comedies, because its not abundantly clear who the real schmuck is.