In Fun with Dick and Jane, Jim Carrey brings his uncommon comedic talents to bear on a satire of the corporate variety. Carrey and Téa Leoni star as Dick and Jane Harper, an affluent suburban couple, who run into trouble when Dick’s company, Globodyne, crashes and he’s out of a job. After months of depleting their savings, Dick and Jane are running out of money and are forced to turn to desperate measures—like armed robbery. The story is a remake of a 1977 movie with the same name, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as the Harpers.
What makes this movie work, similar to all of his other movies, is Jim Carrey’s off-the-wall manic energy. Not since Cary Grant has there been an actor with the range of physical expression that Carrey so effortlessly displays. One excellent example of this in Fun with Dick and Jane is when Dick goes nuts playing with a voice changer while the man whose house they are robbing is tied up in front of him. Seeing Carrey do a robotically-voiced rendition of “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto” is thoroughly hilarious.
But even when Carrey isn’t improvising, the script itself is what satire ought to be. It starts with what could plausibly happen to the employees of a company that goes bankrupt, and takes it into the realm of the absurd. Some other former employees turn to such cash cows as cockfighting, while Dick Harper finally gets an interview at one point, and he is told he does not have to wait on the massive line. This only leads to him being openly mocked in the executive’s office for being made the front man of Globodyne just as its financial underpinnings evaporated.
Another impressive feat of the script is a series of coincidences that make the characters’ lives maddening, while not being unpleasant for the audience to watch. Instead of being annoying, the sequence of thoroughly improbable and highly inconvenient events becomes hilarious. For example, the completely desperate Dick is working as a day laborer, and was punched in the mouth and lost his wallet when the INS shows up to deport the illegal aliens, so Dick is unable to prove that he is, in fact, American. And when he calls home, Dick’s son answers in the Spanish he had been learning from the Harpers’ cleaning lady, landing Dick in a deportation facility and leaving the audience in stitches.
Téa Leoni is also quite good as Jane Harper. Playing the straight man—or woman—to any character of Jim Carrey’s is difficult at best, and Leoni does it masterfully. She also engages in some tomfoolery of her own, such as having an amusing adverse reaction to a cosmetics product she gets paid to be a test subject for. Carrey and Leoni make an excellent team, especially when they’re robbing a sushi restaurant while wearing Bill and Hillary Clinton masks.
Hilarity aside, the movie also has its serious moments, which are needed as ballast for the absurd moments, and Carrey again demonstrates that—while he’s not going to win any Oscars for a purely dramatic movie—he can provide the requisite pathos when he needs to.
Overall, Fun With Dick and Jane is a delightful romp through the seedy underbelly of the corporate world. Anyone who has followed corporate news over the past few years will find the ending hilarious, as the eventual fate of Dick Harper brings the story full circle. Go see this movie.
