Directed by Dean Parisot
Written by Judd Apatow, Nicholas Stoller
Starring Jim Carrey, Tea Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins
Release Date December 21st, 2005
Published December 20th, 2005
Remakes are an inherently lazy project. No matter how well made and recreated they are, remakes are still telling someone else's story and making a profit on it. Laziness is the hallmark of the remake of 1977's Fun With Dick and Jane. With a talented cast including Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni and a script polish by the very funny Judd Apatow, Fun With Dick and Jane is an all the more depressing effort for the talent involved.
Dick Harper (Jim Carrey) has a great job working in corporate communications for a massive corporation called Globodyne. Things are just about to get even better for Dick when the company CEO, slimily portrayed by Alec Baldwin, decides to promote Dick to vice president and put him on TV to talk up Globodyne's latest financial numbers on a Moneyline-esque cable show. Unfortunately as Dick is putting a smiling face on the numbers the stock tanks live on the air. Dick, as the new face of the company, is completely screwed. The CEO has bankrupted the company, including all the severance and pension funds, and is in the wind, leaving Dick and the company's chief finance officer (Richard Jenkins) to take all of the heat.
This could not be worse timing for the Harper family because Dick's wife Jane (Tea Leoni) has just quit her job as a travel agent to spend more time with their son who is being raised by the nanny (the kid had even adopted the nanny's own broken English accent, in an ugly, awful gag). Now with both Dick and Jane out of work, and Dick a virtual pariah in his chosen field, the family faces losing all of their accumulated wealth and their home.
After unfortunate attempts by both Dick and Jane to work at new jobs, Dick at a Wal-mart clone and then as a day laborer, in yet another awful gag, and Jane as an aerobics instructor and product tester, the frustrated couple turn to armed robbery to solve their money troubles. Using their son's toy weapon and the rationalization that they were screwed by the system, the couple sets about robbing convenience stores, coffee shops and eventually even an attempted bank heist before finally turning to revenge against the CEO that put them in this predicament.
Fun With Dick and Jane fails because director Dean Parisot and writers Judd Apatow, Nicolas Stoller and Peter Tollin fail to establish whether they are attempting broad slapstick or dark satire. Most of the film plays to star Jim Carrey's strength, broad physical comedy. However, the story of a family losing everything and turning to desperate measures to keep their home is not a story that lends itself to big slapsticky laughs. Thus, the film fishes around searching for laughs in broad set pieces unable to reconcile those with the film's dark subject.
The filmmakers try everything from funny costumes (the couple dressed as Sonny and Cher with Carrey as Cher) to movie parody (Dick and Jane driving a stolen car into a storefront dressed as the Blues Brothers), to irreverent racial humor, but nothing connects with anything more than mild amusement. And, the racial humor is downright offensive. Watching it you don't laugh as much as you squirm in discomfort.
Director Dean Parisot was the talented director of 2000'sGalaxy Quest, a good natured ribbing of the Star Trek series. There is nothing groundbreaking about that little movie but it hits its target well with good-natured parody. Parisot may be the wrong director for the much darker Dick and Jane in which he irritatingly attempts to force broad comedy out of narrow material. Parisot never finds the right angle on the film's corporate satire and fails miserably in establishing why Dick and Jane must turn to crime in order to survive.
The corporate scandal that costs Dick his job is merely a quick way to get him out of a job so we can get to the supposedly funny attempts at crime. There are a couple of unconvincing scenes of both Dick and Jane trying to work low paying jobs and failing miserably but these scenes fail to help us understand why they must turn to crime. We can feel the plot forcing them toward crime because the crimes are where the supposed comedy is and the filmmakers show their desperation to get through a few setup scenes so they can get the stars into their funny costumes.
Because Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni are such terrifically talented comic actors there are a number of solid laughs in Fun With Dick and Jane. A scene where the couple commit a home invasion robbery dressed in black ninja gear and voice disguisers is funny for the way the couple are like children playing with new toys. Another scene where Dick and Jane ponder their situation while sitting in the unfinished hole where their new hot tub was to be shows each actor's ability to connect with us on a sympathetic level.
Dick and Jane by the standards of decent society aren't good people. They commit serious crimes that are humorously treated by director Dean Parisot but we are never allowed scenes that might help us forgive them their crimes. Simply saying 'it's just a comedy' does not excuse the fact that our protagonists are unpunished criminals. The 1977 version of Fun With Dick and Jane, I'm told, established its heroes as Robin Hood outlaws whose crimes have an undercurrent of social conscience. Yes they were robbers, but when they knocked over banks they also attempted to burn the debt records of other troubled families so that maybe they to could be debt free.
No such moralizing in the new version where the motivation is solely material and selfish. The modern Dick and Jane are concerned about maintaining their social status and regaining their material wealth. A scene where Dick and Jane retrieve their LCD big screen television using some of their ill-gotten gains is played as a moment of triumph with their young son celebrating wildly. I guess, like the nanny, that television was another parent to the kid, which is yet another bit of sardonic humor the film fails to capitalize on.
Spoiler warning!
When at the end our heroes target Baldwin's corporate criminal and end up turning Robin Hood and stealing his money and giving it back to the employees he screwed, we are supposed to admire them. But you can see the plot gears turning as the filmmakers try to redeem these lost characters with one act of deus ex machina, the hand of god, putting everything right with the world in less than 10 minutes screen time.
Fun With Dick and Jane ends with a dedication to the corporations like Enron that have been subjects of the biggest financial swindles in history. Unfortunately, what was intemded to play as an ironic thumb in the eye of these corporations comes off as more of an honest thank you for inspiring this film's failed ideas. Fun With Dick and Jane never develops into any kind of satire of corporate scandals. The corporate crimes in the movie are a mere backdrop for the flailing slapstick physical comedy.
Fun With Dick and Jane is yet another sad, lazy Hollywood remake. The work of slacking geniuses picking up paychecks rather than actually making a funny movie.
