Dick and Jane Harper (Jim Carrey, Téa Leoni) are living the upper-middle class American dream. When Dick gets promoted to VP, the future looks secure and Jane quits her job. But Dick’s boss (Alec Baldwin) is a Ken Lay-style crook and the company folds like Enron. As their lives crumble, Dick and Jane must find a new way to make money. What they find is armed robbery.
Some of you may be unfamiliar with Atlanta traffic. If so, your life is better than those around you who are not in such blissful ignorance. Bask in it. Me? I know it well. And with such knowledge, I set out at 6 pm for a nearby theater to catch the prescreening of Fun With Dick and Jane, the remake of the Jane Fonda/George Segal never-too-pointed satire of ’70s life. An hour later, I was still closer to home than to the theater. Luckily, I had planed to get there early. Instead, after spending an hour and a half on a trip that should take twenty minutes, I arrived just as the lights dimmed, and grabbed my close-enough-to-see-their-nostril-hairs seat. I was not a happy man.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I was in exactly the wrong mood to enjoy and objectively judge a movie, and I came out feeling pretty good. Fun With Dick and Jane isn’t brilliant, deep, or memorable, but it isn’t bad entertainment. If it can overcome the effects of driving on Atlanta’s roads, it’s got something.
The film is in three acts. The first is a satire of corporate America and attempting to live the American dream, and this is where the movie works the best. Dick and Jane are mindless consumers. Dick is enthusiastic about a job where he rattles off meaningless slogans and questionable tech answers. The company is essentially Enron and as it falls, you see the kind of desperation that so many workers have felt in recent years as their savings and security were ripped away. Of course, there’s no other job to go to, and Dick and Jane fall apart as their pretty, but artificial world vanishes.
The situation is so familiar to those of us who lived the corporate life and then saw it all fall apart after Bush was elected. Company after company went bankrupt or downsized (with very few CEOs feeling the pinch). The film is uncomfortably close to reality. I saw the long lines of out-of-work, middle-aged men in their nice suits, trying to find any job. And, like in the movie, there’s no other job out there. It sounds sad, and it is. It also doesn’t sound funny, but it can be. The truth of the situation is ripe with comic potential, particularly as there have been relatively few cinematic comments on the economic collapse of the last five years (standup comics don’t count as cinematic).
When Dick reaches his breaking point, the film takes a sharp turn and becomes a slapstick, holdup picture. The script has problems with what should have been the easiest scenes as the robberies are comedy low. You get Carrey doing some of his same old shtick, getting his gun caught in his coat (and jerking wildly to get it out for far too long), and flailing about with fake kung fu moves (which isn’t funny when your kid brother or nephew does it, and it isn’t funny here). However, there are a few good moments as they gain back their old lifestyle, now enhanced with the excitement of being criminals.
The final segment switches gears again, becoming a big-caper movie. Dick and Jane just need to pull off one last heist. It connects with the corporate immorality from the beginning of the film, but outside of pointing out what the rich do to avoid taxes, it doesn’t bring back the satire. There are good moments, but on a sitcom level.
Carrey is reasonable as a yuppie with a heart but not enough brain, showing he has the looks and ability to play a leading man. He keeps his overacting and extreme antics to a minimum, though his occasional over-the-top expression and unnecessary thrashing does mar the middle of the film. A bit of editing would have done wonders. Téa Leoni is pleasant, funny, and sexy. She and Carrey make a likable team.
Fun With Dick and Jane would have been better if it had shown some teeth. It takes aim, and then lets its victim get away. A TV screen shows President Bush talking about how prosperity is here, but this obviously false statement is never followed-up. The CEO telling the news crew to watch him as he turns from their questions to go hunting is reminiscent of Bush ignoring reporters’ questions and instead telling them to watch his golf swing, but again, nothing more is made of this. The best punch the picture gets in is in the credits, were it thanks some truly special people and institutions (sorry, but you’ll have to read it yourself). But the heart to attack the American corporate facade isn’t there in a film that paints the boss as a villain, with his four houses, but seems to accept that Dick and Jane really need a swimming pool and a huge house with a servant.