Dick and Jane are in love, they're young, they're very successful - pretty much living the American dream. That is until one morning when they wake up to find they're living the American nightmare. Everything changes overnight when the enormous financial corporation that Dick (Jim Carrey) works for becomes involved in an Enron-like scandal. To make matters just a bit worse, Dick had just the been promoted to Vice President of Communications just in time to make him the perfect patsy to pin the rap on. Because of Dick's promotion Jane (Tea Leoni) had just a few days prior quit her lucrative job with a travel agency, thus our all-American couple are both unemployed - oh and there's also the silly little matter of Dick's indictment. Are we having "fun" yet?

Even though playing by the rules has left them so financially embarrassed that they have to take showers in their neighbors lawn sprinklers (because their own lawn has already been repossessed) - Dick and Jane decide to have another go at making an honest living. Writer's Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin) and Nicholas Stoller are masters at blending comedy with pathos as they proved with such ground-breaking televison work as Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. They lead Dick and Jane through a series of hilariously humiliating jobs that wouldn't come close to paying their bills even if they could hold them down. It's also a testament to the writer's skill that they are able to make such a convincing case that Dick and Jane really have no alternative but to pursue a life of crime in order to maintain the style of life to which they and their son have become accustomed. Thus Dick rationalizes their newfound Bonnie and Clyde
way of life by pointing out that if stealing was good enough for his bosses, then it's good enough for them.

I have to wonder if over the past twenty years or so if we as the movie going public have beome less intelligent or is it that the movie studios and executives just think we have. Don't get me wrong Fun with Dick and Jane is one of the funnier movies released this year, and it does manage to take some intelligent jabs at the corporation-crazy world we find ourselves living in. Sadly though, in spite of it's moments of wit and political smarts, the film really ends up chickening out, or at the very least selling itself short, by resorting to the more sure-fire, dumbed-down approach. It just felt to me like a cop-out that they went for the safe-bet, instead of trying to capture the style of the original. The self-same thing happened to the recent remake of the Longest Yard, dumb it down, play it safe and forget about trying to match the intelligence and panache or the original.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing the original Fun with Dick and Jane in preparation for seeing the remake and Jane Fonda and George Segal had such charm and wit to them that made the movie marvelously funny without sacrificing one iota of the the film's stylish intelligence. Tea Leoni and Jim Carrey could have easily pulled off the same level of charm and grace under pressure, but again the suits decided to hedge their bets by having Jim Carrey hit the clown button and banking on the cheap gags and the physical schtick. What's most disheartening about this is that Carrey has proven that he can make it work without falling back on his trademark frugging and mugging (see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It's a shame that they couldn't have stuck to the spirit of the original, because they had all of the elements in place to have made a much better film here. Leoni is a perfect choice to play Carrey's counterpart, her timing and deadpan delivery reminded me a lot of Jane Fonda and I laughed harder at her more subtle one-liners than Carrey's over-the-top antics. It was her performance that really made the movie. Alec Baldwin was his usual dependable self and Appatow is arguably the smartest comic screenwriter in the business.

I hate to leave the impression that this wasn't a hell of a lot of fun - I did laugh hard, and there were moments of great wit and poignancy - but by aiming the film at a lower common denominater, the film makers really missed the charm of the original.