Written by: David Guion & Michael Handelman
Full credits at IMDb
Schmucks is meant to be a comic fantasy to mollify the schmucks in the audience, still apprehensive about their long-term unemployment. Did you notice that Sullivan’s Travels was playing at the rep house in the background of Rudd and Carell’s meet cute? People who have jobs, like the double-underlined-bad [guy], are all really mean. And bad. (They close factories! They don’t care about radioactive waste!) And so it’s quitting his job at the end that makes Rudd able, finally, to be the person that his girlfriend knows (and not the one she doesn’t know)—the one that she loves. Once she loses her job, too, in that final scene, you know they’ll finally be able to be happy together. Being unemployed is actually really great! It frees you up to be your naturally happy self.You see this kind of thinking in movies, and the popular culture in general, all the time: that it’s actually really hard to be rich. You know, because mo’ money mo’ problems? But that’s just a bullshit line billionaire studio heads feed the poor so they (we?) won’t feel so bad about their inability to buy groceries. It’s tough to be rich? Meh, I’ll take my chances, thanks.
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine.
Watch the trailer:
1 comment:
Yeah, the "it's tough being rich" thing has always been a meme that's annoyed me. Or the "it's okay to rip off corporations because they're evil!" that you saw in the late 90s--Fight Club and Office Space.
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