A new thing, in the movies as elsewhere in life, is a rarity,
but I think I’ve stumbled on one. It is a new genre which we might
call paranoid comedy. Paranoia is of course rife in Hollywood, and
paranoid documentaries, thrillers, and political dramas are now
almost the only kind there are. But until now comedy has remained
mostly immune from its corrosive effects. No longer. At least not
to judge from Fun With Dick and Jane. Superficially this
film resembles other sympathetic treatments of middle-class
criminals, not least its original version, starring George Segal
and Jane Fonda, of 1977. But where economic conditions in 1977 were
at least fairly grim, today we are approaching what economists call
“full employment.” Why are this Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane (Tea
Leoni) turning criminal? That’s where the paranoia comes in. This
film attempts to persuade us that, because virtually all the rest
of the world is criminal, or complicit in crime, or else powerless
to do anything about it, its heroes’ criminality is inevitable and
justified. In the end they mete out a sort of vigilante justice as
a way of empowering themselves against the vast and terrifying
forces arrayed against them.
It’s not an obvious recipe for comedy, though it can’t entirely
keep out the laughs owing to Mr. Carrey’s energetic mugging. His
character works for a giant corporation called Globodyne which —
but need I say more? We know already from all the other paranoid
movies that nothing good is going to come to Dick from the giant
corporation that employs him only to take advantage of him —
though, rather oddly it might seem, Dick himself doesn’t know it.
Yet. On the contrary, he thinks he’s in clover because he’s just
made vice president for communications of Globodyne. On the
strength of his promotion, he suggests to Jane that she quit her
job to spend more time with their son, Billy, who has spent so much
time with his nanny that his native language appears to be Spanish.
Nobody does boyish innocence — albeit boyish innocence now long
since prolonged into middle age — better than Jim Carrey, though
his little dances and songs of triumph at his promotion are laying
it on a little thick, maybe. Of course, the more he rejoices the
more certain we are of what is to come.
Globodyne’s CEO, Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin), and CFO, Frank
Bascom (Richard Jenkins), send the new VP on a TV show called
“MoneyLife with Sam Samuels” to talk about the company. There he is
ambushed with questions about highly embarrassing financial
shenanigans on the part of McAllister and Bascom about which he
clearly knows nothing. We watch as poor Dick stammers and stumbles
his way through the show while in a corner of the screen a graphic
of Globodyne’s stock price plunges towards zero. Why would his
bosses set him up like this? What did they stand to gain from his
and the company’s embarrassment and the sudden collapse of its
stock? Even more puzzling, how can it be that it is Dick who is
said to be under threat of indictment for his part in a crime which
he has just given the world such a spectacular demonstration of
knowing nothing at all about?
But that’s paranoia for you. McAllister gets off scot-free with
the $400 million he has looted from the company while Bascom gets a
light, 18-month sentence and a $10 million payoff for keeping his
mouth shut. Dick, meanwhile, becomes the patsy because, well,
because he’s sweet, funny, innocent Jim Carrey, a man born to be a
(movie) patsy. There is more paranoia in Dick’s inability to find
another job when Globodyne goes out of business. In the real world
the economy may be humming along nicely, but in the world of
Hollywood paranoia it’s always the 1930s and Dick and Jane’s only
choices are eviction and the soup kitchen or a life of crime. Of
course there is the third alternative of a job at Wal-Mart
— sorry, that’s Kost-Mart here — but Dick, after giving
it a brief try, prefers indigence, homelessness, and the chance of
prison when he turns to crime. As anybody would.
And so another left-wing political base is touched as another
giant conspiracy to impoverish the world is uncovered by the way.
Likewise, the close credits offer ironic thanks to Enron, WorldCom,
ImClone, Adelphia etc. as a way of reinforcing the message that
everybody in the corporate world is doing it, and doing it to us,
or our surrogates, Dick and Jane. Interestingly, the one exception
to the rule that there are not, for most of us when we are
job-seeking, hundreds of applicants for every position is the
profession of acting. There there really are demoralizing mobs of
people up for every available part, as there apparently are here
even for the kinds of executive jobs that Dick is applying for.
This fact just might help explain how it is that we are getting a
movie about the evil rich from a guy making $20 million or more
every time he steps in front of a camera. For someone who has
experience of the precarious living to be made as an actor is more
likely to think he has earned success when it comes, and to look
with contempt on the corporate types who all get rich, as it must
seem to him, without running anything like the same risks. It’s
more paranoia, of course, but at least it is a bit more
understandable paranoia than that on offer in this oddly unreal
though not always unfunny comedy.
