It didn’t take long in the first grade for the Dick and Jane reader to grow tiresome. Characters who stand around and exclaim over how they can see each other run are not especially exciting. But there was also something warm and reassuring about Dick and Jane’s world, their dog Spot, and their parents. They provided a model for how we, as 6 and 7 year olds in the 1950s, thought about ourselves and our simple, happy world, even as the double specters of civil rights and nuclear world war began to break through our unknowing complacency.
The film Fun with Dick and Jane, a remake of a 1970s film with Jane Fonda and George Segal, invests that idealized 1950s world of safety and affluence with reality tinged with the financial scandals of the 1990s and 2000s. In this new version Dick is played by Jim Carrey and Jane by Téa Leoni. They have a $600,000 house in affluent suburbs, with a 6-year old son who speaks Spanish better than English because he has been raised by a Hispanic housekeeper. Dick and Jane have all the appurtenances of affluence—a beautiful place to live, a flat-screen television, state-of-the-arts kitchen, beautiful furniture, and a hole in the backyard where the hot tub is being put in.
All of this luxury comes at a price. Jane works as a travel agent, while Dick is an officer in a financial affairs company, Globodyne, more than faintly similar to Enron. One day Dick is summoned up to the 56th floor of his company’s building and is appointed vice president for communications. His first task is to give a television interview where he will answer questions about the company’s financial stability. He thinks he will be reporting on quarterly earnings but instead is asked about the financial shenanigans of his company’s officers, about rumors of corruption and scandal. He is completely flummoxed because he is not at all prepared to answer those questions. He is, after all, not the kind of person who would be called on to serve as a vice president for communications in the first place. He is too eager, too ambitious, too willing to please, too inept. Like Enron before it, Globodyne tanks. Soon, Dick is without a job, and so is Jane, who quit her own position thinking there was no further need to work with the big salary her husband would be earning. They plan to live on their income until he can find another job, but because they invested all their earnings and savings in Globodyne, they soon find themselves penniless.
The rest of the film describes the plight of Dick and Jane, without money, their home foreclosed on, their front lawn repossessed. They resort to robbery—first quickie marts, soon banks—to survive. The hilarity of their adventures as robbers and thieves takes up much of the film. Ultimately, they happen on a way to work revenge on the owner of Globodyne. This too takes up much of the film’s time, and in some way it is apparently supposed to redeem and justify their robberies of convenience stores and banks.
Fun with Dick and Jane is a comedy. It shows the hilarious exploits of Dick and Jane as they rob a store disguised as Bill and Hillary, and later as Sonny and Cher. They are a bungling, endearing, desperate pair, even as they are robbing banks. We are supposed to commiserate with them, to feel their desperation. We are supposed to see them as typical upwardly mobile Americans, victimized by corrupt companies and owners, forced to resort to robbery and worse in order to stay afloat. One could view this as a kind of Robin Hood ethic, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. The trouble is that the people doing the robbing here started out close to being rich themselves, and they are robbing in order to maintain their wealth and their affluent lives, not to benefit the poverty-stricken. There’s no altruistic impulse in Dick and Jane, except, you might argue, at the end, where the plot they concoct to avenge themselves on the corrupt company owner has the effect of restoring lost pensions to thousands who once worked for Globodyne.
This is pretty hollow moralism. What you learn in this film is that Dick and Jane—rich, affluent, self-absorbed, white—are not much different from the company owner. They commit crimes in order to sustain their wealth, and we are supposed to find them heroic.
I am one of those few who think that Jim Carrey can be a fiercely comic actor. I especially liked a scene on the elevator where he sings and cavorts, ascending towards the 56th floor of the Globodyne building, where he thinks he is about to be anointed with a prestigious title and a high salary. Such small scenes are hilarious, and they save the film for a moment or two, as does the scene in which Dick and Jane’s little boy protests loudly in a heavy Spanish accent when he sees his parents carrying off the flat-screen television, intending to sell it for money.
This is a schizophrenic, self-deceiving film. Is it slapstick or social satire or both? Sometimes it is both, and in those rare moments it might be said to “work.” Most often is doesn’t know what it wants to be, and its vision is fundamentally craven and self-congratulatory. It is the kind of film one might make when he or she wants to pretend to be politically savvy and au courant without confronting the real issues.
The credits at the end of the film thank Enron, WorldCom, and other recently vanished companies that disappeared from the scene because of the glut and greed of their managers and major stock holders, and that in their absence have left despair and financial suffering. Nowhere to be seen in the film are the true victims of these companies, those blue and lower-level white collar workers who lost their life earnings and their pensions when these companies collapsed, who had little to begin with, and less in the end. These are the real victims, and they have as much to blame Dick and Jane for as they do the Kenneth Lays and Jeffrey Skillings. The world of those victims, the real victims, is hardly acknowledged in Fun with Dick and Jane.
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