Fun With Dick and Jane

When I saw a reviewer say: “What follows is a kind of modern Depression comedy - a bit like /Sullivan’s Travels/, set in Silicon Valley. Dick eventually sinks to day labour with Mexican illegals. Jane becomes a guinea pig for dangerous pharmaceutical testing.” I honestly thought Jim Carrey might be going for the jugular with Fun with Dick and Jane.  Its good—maybe “great” by Hollywood standards for political satire—but no jugulars were opened.  A clue:  Ralph Nader made a cameo appearance as himself.  But they missed so much potential fun…

You can’t really expect that much from guys like Jim Carrey, Ralph Nader and Alec Baldwin—but for their collective depth of character combined with the financing/distribution milieu of Hollywood they did a decent job.  This is a semi-farcical mass-appeal movie trying and largely succeeding to satirize much of the recent corporate sleaze—so cut them some slack, pay your $7 and laugh a little.

I’ve been relatively nice up to now right?

So here’s what Carrey et al didn’t portray:

• An aging boomer corporate concubine being kicked out on the street who had moved to NYC when she was young, basically for no higher function than to raise the (fertile) female to male ratio in NYC for the benefit of day traders who would soak GI-generation geezers of their real estate equity during bogus IPOs—sending them copies of Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” in lieu of anything of value.  She then returns to her hometown where she hopes to get back together with her high school sweet heart but he’s become a meth freak.  She then faces the remainder of her years, childless, friendless and destitute.
• Guy in his early 40s who lived in apartments in Silicon Valley for years as a corporate eunuch who, during the final years of his soon-to-be-dead career saw a bit of hope for stock options but instead ended up $100,000 in debt to the IRS for “alternative minimum taxes” and no prospect for future employment.  He goes back home to live with mom and dad after training his H-1b visa replacements from India.  He finds a job competing with call centers in India for a few months but then faces the rest of his life working minimum wage at Walmart.  He tries to get together with the rejected corporate concubine.  But with the biological clock having run out on his sex drive as well as her fertility nothing comes from it but a couple of damaged people further damaging each other when they can least afford it.
• A glimpse of a rare acquaintance of theirs who hit the jackpot during the big DotCon returning to his high school reunion to meet the above two characters and lecturing them on how they’re succumbing to bitterness.
• A young guy who left a state university to go to Silicon Valley during the height of the DotCon to live in hovels.  He goes to raves in San Francisco for entertainment where his erstwhile girlfriend, whom he met at his DotCon company, is pursued by 4 other guys from the same company.  She goes home with the VP con artist and he becomes the butt of continuing jokes at work.  Unable to find any other social outlet he continues going to the raves and while on some sort of hallucinogen suddenly discovers, much to his amazement, he’s GAY.  The DotCon bubble then bursts and he goes home to live with his parents with his own $100,000 in debt from the “alternative minimum tax” on his worthless stock options, to slowly lose his mind to AIDS neuropathy.  He struggles in vain to find someone, anyone, something, anything that will have sex with him.

Now, I know what you’re thinking—where’s the humor?  Can this be a comedy?  How could Carrey et al sell something like this?

You haven’t heard the proposed punch line:

The US dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency, a pandemic hits and The Man, having found out he’s not The Stud he thought he was, loses His collective mind and nukes Iran, Syria and any other enemy of Israel as His psychotic attempt to restore some semblance of familiarity to the world.  Then to The Man’s surprise nukes that had been, over decades of His open borders policy, smuggled into the urban centers of the US and Europe suddenly go BOOM.  Not even the talking heads are left to tell us about how “hateful” the people who did this are.

All of the above characters join in the fun and have a good laugh while finding some bitter-sweet meaning to life.

It’s at once a tear-jerker, uplifting and side-splitting comedy.

Posted by James Bowery on Friday, December 23, 2005 at 02:11 AM in Humour
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