The English-language remake is enough of a modern anomaly that I can only name a few casualties in recent memory: Speak No Evil, Force Majeure, Let the Right One In – each softened & diluted from their European source material to appeal to mainstream audiences in the US. There surely have been meetings to put festival darlings like Anatomy of a Fall, Parasite, and Toni Erdmann through that dumbing-down process, but thankfully the practice of sparing American audiences from complex themes and the burden of reading subtitles has mostly dried up, so none of those projects got off the ground. I do not wish to participate in any nostalgia for the glory days of the English-language remake, but I will admit they’re not all bad. A recent screening of The Birdcage‘s source text La Cage aux Folles at New Orleans French Film Fest had me picking apart the ways that the American version tweaked the original’s template to greater comedic success, if not only through the strength of its performances. Likewise, I spent much of my time watching La Cage aux Folles screenwriter Francis Verber’s single-location farce The Dinner Game imagining how well it would have translated across cultural lines for multi-language remakes. It’s the first time in my life I can remember wanting to see an English-language remake of a European film instead of finding the concept repugnant. One Wikipedia search later, I discovered that not only had The Dinner Game already been remade in America, but I saw that remake when it came out, and it was predictably bland, like the majority of films given that treatment.
The titular dinner game is a cruel ritual in which a group of bourgeois assholes compete to see who can bring the biggest “idiot” to the table as an unsuspecting guest, a perverse hobby the business-prick sickos perform every Wednesday night. They target lonely men with esoteric hobbies like collecting boomerangs or antique ladles, while not recognizing that their own hobby of collecting “idiots” is equally dorky. In France, the film’s title Le Dîner de Cons translates literally to “Dinner for Idiots”. In America, it was remade as Dinner for Schmucks. There are two glaring reasons why I did not recognize the premise from my one-time viewing of Dinner for Schmucks over a decade ago: 1. Outside the opening credits sequence that details the titular schmuck’s mockable hobby (Steve Carell, taxidermist), there’s absolutely nothing memorable about it, and 2. It diluted & reshaped the French source material so much that their resemblance is effectively obliterated. The American version of The Dinner Game feels compelled to deliver on the promise of the premise, making sure that a significant chunk of the narrative action takes place during the dinner. In the original, however, dinner is never served, and the maddening ways in which the “World Champion Idiot” constantly derails the plot’s progression towards that dinner are almost Buñuelian in their absurdity (recalling, specifically, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise). It’s like a stage play where the audience is not allowed to escape Act 1, while the upper-class assholes are cosmically tortured for their crimes against the droll hobbyists of the world.
Jacques Villeret stars as a milquetoast tax auditor who staves off loneliness by making models of famous architecture using only matchsticks & glue. The square-jawed Thierry Lhermitte is excited to show off this breathtaking discovery of “idiocy” to his social circle of cads, but he never arrives to dinner with his World Champion Idiot in tow. Instead, Villeret unwittingly, systematically ruins Lermitte’s entire life one asset at a time – dissolving his marriage, driving his mistress to suicidal ideation, subjecting him to investigation for tax fraud, and effectively crippling him by tweaking his spasmatic back. None of these effects are the result of malicious intent, and most are achieved through mishandled phone calls made from Lermitte’s apartment. Alternating between the giddiness of a small child and the dead-eyed stare of a walking corpse, all the sweetheart imbecile Villeret can do is apologize by admitting, “I goofed,” after each social catastrophe. The audience is always on the pure-hearted idiot’s side, however, and any downfalls suffered by his straight-man victim register as just desserts for participating in the cruel ritual of the title. The fact that Villeret manages to make Lermitte’s plans backfire spectacularly before the game even starts is itself part of the cosmic torture. It’s a universally funny premise that translates well enough across cultural divides that every country could’ve staged its own Birdcage-style remake without deviating from the original script, each featuring its own National Champion Idiot: Roberto Benigni in Italy, Rowan Atkinson in the UK, Chris Farley in the US, etc. Instead, it got diluted & reshaped into Dinner for Schmucks, decades too late and mangled beyond recognition. Oh well.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 