When people complain that Hollywood is out of touch with mainstream America, Exhibit A should be not Brokeback Mountain, but Fun With Dick and Jane. It’s a surprisingly heartless “comedy” that expects you to sympathize with a pair of spoiled, overpaid brats (Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni) who resort to progressively more desperate measures when they lose their jobs. Desperate measures like, you know, getting another job, only one that doesn’t pay six figures. And, eventually, robbery, after they’ve exhausted almost none of their options. All so they can hang on to their McMansion – and their maid (who speaks, natch, with a lisping Latino accent). Excuse me if I take this opportunity to not care about their struggles as the movie pokes mean-spirited (and unfunny) fun at immigrant day laborers and other assorted “little people” who appear mainly to remind us how degrading it is for Dick and Jane to associate with them.
It might be funny to watch their discomfort if the movie was in on the joke, if it depicted Dick and Jane as such arrogant assholes that armed robbery was more appealing to them than consorting with the lower classes. But the filmmakers go out of their way to emphasize how horrible it is that these lovely – and, let’s say it: white – people have sunk to having to work at a Wal-Mart clone, surrounded by toothless old people and former crack addicts. And I might have had more sympathy for the characters if their plight had been more believable: Dick loses his job as vice president of an Enron-like company (in case it wasn’t clear enough, the movie hammers this connection home with a heavy-handed joke at the end, when one of Dick’s former colleagues beams about his great new job at this cool new firm called… Enron), apparently spends a few months looking unsuccessfully for other vice presidential jobs, then goes right to day laboring and Wal-Mart greeting. Um, there’s a middle ground, you know? Meanwhile, wife Jane impulsively quits her job as a travel agent – then never even tries to get it back, instead opting for ridiculously low-paying medical trial (which does provide the funniest thing in the movie: in the background as Jane is being briefed on the trial, you can see a monkey in a diaper throwing stuff at lab assistants – I say, “Less Jane, more monkey!”).
Sure, I’m nitpicking a movie not designed to stand up to any rational thought, but my intent is to point out how lazy and thoughtless it is (not to mention how it divides American society into poor, dirty, mockable people and rich, deserving, clean people – was this funded by the Republican party, by any chance?). Everything that happens in the movie happens to set up a joke, and as soon as it’s served its purpose, we’re supposed to forget about it. Don’t use your money to reward this shoddy effort.
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