"That was my wife's favorite finger," is the funniest line in a great date movie. It’s delivered shortly after a hilarious visual image, a relaxed vulture seated at a formal dinner table.
Who are the schmucks, and why are they having dinner together—with or without the vulture? First of all, what is a schmuck? According to my dictionary, a schmuck is Yiddish for penis, but the connotation is contemptible, so a better translation might be dickhead. If this frank language shocks you, you won’t like the picture, for much of the humor comes from philosophical cracks about human sexuality.
Stop reading now.
If you’re still with me, here’s the story: To get a promotion to the seventh floor, Tim (Paul Rudd) is charged with finding an “idiot” to invite to his boss’s annual dinner. The idea is to bring together a collection of fools and imbeciles, to give the power elites something to laugh at. But does Tim really want to humiliate some poor schmuck to put himself in a superior position? Julie (Stephanie Szostak), his lovely lover, thinks the dinner sounds horrible and she’s unlikely to marry a man who would participate. And to satisfy her ethical stance, Tim might have gone on to earn his promotion the hard way. But that would have been a different story.
Instead, what happens is Barry (Steve Carell) steps in front of Tim’s car in moving traffic. The collision is executed with perfect slapstick form and, despite a flip in the air and a roll across the windshield, Barry emerges unhurt. This simple action—Barry stepping in front of Tim’s moving Porche to rescue a dead mouse—is the first in a string of choices and socially inappropriate behavior that make him appear to be an utterly senseless person. He even mistakes Tim’s interest – for Tim immediately sees Barry could be the ringer at the dinner party—for friendship and proceeds to stalk him, not maliciously, but because he thinks Tim is wise and kind.
Meanwhile, Julie, a gallery curator, is involved professionally with an artist whose animal magnetism threatens her relatively tame relationship with financial analyst, Tim.
This last plot twist may sound like a love triangle. It is. But the artist isn’t just another guy threatening the sanctity of true love. He’s a larger-than-life character whose narcissistic canvases are gigantic self-portraits, some of which involve cross-dressing as mythical beasts. (Another funny visual to picture in your mind’s eye: Celebrated artist dancing in hooves.) His character defines the playing field of the entire story, for the heart and soul of Dinner is a meditation on the thin line between genius and idiocy.
Barry is also equal parts genius and idiot, and Carell is a master at playing the idiot savant who soars above the worldly sophisticates who mock him. (I’m fondly reminded of the innocent he played in 40-Year-Old Virgin.) The savant side of Barry is his extreme focus and artistry. By day he’s an IRS bureaucrat. On his own time he creates extraordinary tableaus, populated with the dead mice he prepares at the taxidermy. A single dead mouse, painted and dressed up like a little man is creepy. But Barry's recreations of historic events, like the Wright Brothers' first flight in their Kitty Hawk, are exquisite in their detail. He could have made and used artificial mice for his scenes, but the once-living miniature characters make an organic, visceral connection to the scenes they inhabit.
Barry, the idiot, is incompetent in social situations. He gets nose-to-nose in casual street conversations, demonstrating his baseline lack of awareness about what is appropriate space. And, though he’s not stupid, he has peculiar gaps of information. He knows how to adjust a human spine (like a chiropractor) from his delicate work posing dead mice. But he doesn’t know where to find the human clitoris.
Even so, Barry the idiot is willing to play tag with a dominatrix. Picture a collision of irrational passion and innocent playfulness, a scene filled with broken safety glass, glittering like diamonds.
At the dinner, Barry the genius stacks a pyramid of dioramas (including the one of the Wright Brothers) to tell his story. He builds a monument to dreamers. And the price of admission is worth it for this scene alone.
What was missing for me: a fully developed female character. Yes, the love interest is lovely, but her hesitation to commit to a corporate climber is generic, “I don’t know who the real you is . . .” Her natural attraction to pure animal magnetism is soft-pedaled. All the men talk about her temptation to go the artist’s ranch and ultimately his bed. But she never actually has the moment where she is pulled into the artist’s erotic spell. I wanted to see her struggle to discern between vaulted passion and irresponsible lack of control.
Also, I wanted Tim’s assistant to function at a higher level (in the same way the artist functions as much more than the extra in a love triangle). The assistant (comedienne Kristen Schaal) is a strong character who motivates Tim to pitch his ideas to the firm’s power brokers, and she coaches him with directions about how to get to the seventh floor. Then she disappears from the story. Granted, it’s a small part, but I was almost sure that she’d reappear, possibly giving Barry directions for how to navigate the female anatomy.
Overall, this is still a well-conceived story, and the theme holds all the slapstick and sex jokes together. The whole is raised far above what might otherwise be cheap laughs because of the clarity, dramatized throughout and articulated with a John Lennon lyric—“You may think that I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.” For that clear thought, I rate the movie 9 out of 10.
Aside to the director: Congratulations, Jay. I think this is your best work, to date.
And I leave you, dear reader, with one last image:
A sculpture of a man’s pointing index finger, complete with power ring and the inscribed words, “This was my wife’s favorite finger.”
