Dîner Engagement

I had a more or less average reaction to last year's comedy, Dinner for Schmucks. It's not like I was itching to see the French film on which it was originally based. But many critics mentioned it in their reviews of the adaptation, hailing it as the superior film. Netflix also pushed it on me as a suggestion. So I decided to give it a shot.

The original is known as "Le Dîner de Cons," which is inaccurately translated into English as "The Dinner Game." (Probably because, if I understand the original title correctly, it's rather vulgar.) And it turns out that it's an adaptation too, of a stage play. While the American version opens up the action effectively enough that I never spotted the theatrical roots, this French film smacks of "one-act, one-room play." We never even see the dinner of the title, and I frankly found that quite a letdown.

Aside from the missing climax, the main plot points actually hew fairly closely to the American adaptation. Having seen one, there's little need to see the other. So then, which one to see? Well... I have to risk being an "ugly American" now and say that I found the remake vastly superior. Few things are as culturally specific as humor, and I simply found that the jokes in the French film just weren't working for me. Start with a different style of joke-telling, present it in a different way of acting, and filter it through subtitles, and I'm sorry to say the end result just isn't that funny.

Undoubtedly, your results would vary if you're a native French speaker. But I don't even think I'd recommend the movie to you on those terms, as I myself only found it worthy of a D+.

I mean, how much better could it reasonably get?