Out & About:
Friday Movies
Dinner With Schmucks; Eat Pray Love
It was my firm intention to watch the DVD of Francis Veber’s Diner des cons before seeing Jay Roach’s Hollywood remake, Dinner With Schmucks. But it didn’t work out. The remake was the only film showing conveniently, so I fit it in. As it turned out, there was no need to compare and contrast, because the two movies have almost nothing in common. Oh, a lot of superficial story points. But nothing fundamental. Diner des cons is a classic mordant European farce, laughing truth to power. Dinner With Schmucks is a classic American folk tale, trumping intelligence with good-heartedness. The French film scolds its elitist snobs for not paying more attention to what they’re doing: they’re the fools in the end. The American film is all about being nice, and not hurting people’s feelings. While Diner des cons gives rein to some pretty unattractive impulses, Dinner With Schmucks suggests that American civics never really outgrows the priorities of kindergarten. It was bad enough that Hollywood producers didn’t understand Diner des cons well enough to know that they would never be able to reproduce it for Anglophone audiences. The actual adaptation is much worse, a deeply shaming infantility.
So much for Dinner With Schmucks as viewed in compare-and-contrast mode. I’d really like to know how many ticket buyers will have seen Mr Veber’s original. Another way of putting this: I’d like to know how many Americans wanted to see this picture even though they hadn’t seen, or known about, Diner des cons. Steve Carrell is a beloved comedian, sans doute, but how many of his fans want to see him with prosthetic teeth and a geeky haircut? He is genuinely unattractive in Dinner With Schmucks — unless, of course, you’re looking at him as a kind of persistent lapdog — but he is also not Jim Carrey, master of disguise. Of course, I’d also like to read somebody’s master’s thesis about Hollywood’s bizarre tennis match with French comedy, a game played by Pourquoi and Pourqois Pas. (Nobody ever wins.)
As a narrative comedy, Dinner With Schmucks is wholly without merit, even if you haven’t seen the original. It would bruise me to retail the shoddiness of its plot. Such charms as the movie blandishes are borne entirely by its cast. I will not comment on Mr Carrell’s appeal, as I’m not susceptible to it even when the actor plays nice guys. (I don’t think that I will ever be able to forgive and forget the stillborn Dan in Real Life.) I will say, though, that I’m deeply charmed by Paul Rudd’s increasing resemblance, not exclusively facial, to Paul Newman. Anyone who has seen The Oh in Ohio, or even Knocked Up, knows that Mr Rudd can be, well, distant. But he seems to be on a career-smart diet of fundamentally good-natured smart-asses who are the first to see the error of their ways. If it’s typecasting, bring it on. That anyone (okay, me) would want to see Role Models a second time is testament to Paul Rudd’s leading man magic.
Then there is Lucy Punch. I wish that there had been more of Lucy Punch in Dinner With Schmucks. I used to dislike Lucy Punch, but that was only because I disliked Avice Crichton, the opportunistic schemer in one of my favorite movies, Being Julia. By the time that I’d watched Being Julia for the twenty-fifth time, however, I’d come round to liking Ms Punch a lot, and I’m already looking forward to studying her work, so to speak, in Dinner With Schmucks, once the DVD comes out. I am going to come out and say that you really ought to see Dinner With Schmucks on the strength of her supporting role alone. You can shoot me if you don’t like it.
Well, no; you can’t.
Eat Pray Love is said to be a chick flick, but nothing could be further from the truth. Somehow, Ryan Murphy, Julia Roberts, and who knows who else in Hollywood have managed to turn out a kind of movie that MGM could never figure out how to make in the old days and that Warner Brothers lacked the resources to attempt. We will call it the Diva Rapture. Julia Roberts bears a slight resemblance, in her acting, to Joan Crawford, and none at all to Bette Davis, but she carries her new movie with a triumph that they were never allowed. Eat Pray Love, for most of its run time, is a gripping movie about Julia Roberts — and we don’t mean this sarcastically. Forget Elizabeth Gilbert’s story, even if its scenery is honored. Eat Pray Love explores the existentialism of being Julia Roberts, a woman who is both the biggest female movie star going — a role that she has commanded for well over a decade — and yet also a mere human being just like the rest of us, subject to fits of loneliness and uncertainty and self-reproach. She is just like us in the privacy of her own selfhood, but her public aspect partakes of a Bourbon grandeur, not because she’s at all stuck up but precisely because she isn’t. It turns out that watching Julia Roberts contemplate the mysteries of life is genuinely riveting. She’s grave, she’s elegaic, she’s in tears. You don’t want it to stop; you want to go on feeling her pain. The gorgeous backdrops (once she leaves Manhattan), the convivial Italian dinners, the awesome Indian rigors — everything functions as a series of extraordinary lighting arrangements for the beauty of Julia Roberts’s character. To deny the grandeur of the first three-quarters of Eat Pray Love is to be blind.
But then — well, the movie doesn’t entirely crumble into tarballs when Julia is asked to fall in love with Javier Bardem. But it becomes pretty trite. Julia in love is a giddy schoolgirl, more gifted with snappy comebacks than you might expect (not all of them verbal) but hopelessly eager; the majestic restraint of the earlier film is smashed like a piggy-bank full of Krugerrands. It doesn’t help that Mr Bardem brings nothing to his performance that wasn’t on view in his trickster turn in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; this has the effect of making Ms Roberts look a bit like a dope. Eat Pray Love would have been a masterpiece, if only it had ended on the same note as the first installment of Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth. Lets face it: you don’t have to be gay to understand that Diva Rapture requires Renunciation.
In closing, we must note that we are looking forward to seeing a lot more of Tuva Novotny. Maybe even a remake of Down With Love.