Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [19]
In other words, our two young heroines set in motion the Watergate scandal. Not that they notice. In fact, the girls remain blissfully unaware of everything going on around them throughout the story: that’s the central joke. While Woody Allen’s Zelig and Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump reveled in being in the right place at the right time, these airheads don’t realize they’ve been accidental eyewitnesses to history.
Dan Hedaya is well cast as President Nixon, who eventually hires the teenagers to walk his dog, Checkers. Saul Rubinek is Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who reveals more than he should within earshot of the girls. Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch are Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Dave Foley is Bob Halde-man, Jim Breuer is John Dean, Ana Gasteyer is Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods, and Harry Shearer is Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy.
If you’re old enough to have lived through the Watergate years and these names are receding in your memory, you may enjoy reliving that difficult period through a welcome prism of comedy. If you haven’t a clue as to who these people were, or the nature of the events that led to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974, you’ll get a sugar-coated history lesson. Either way, Dick is good fun.
25. THE DINNER GAME
(1998)
Directed by Francis Veber
Screenplay by Francis Veber
Based on the stage play Le dîner de cons by Francis Veber
Actors:
JACQUES VILLERET
THIERRY LHERMITTE
FRANCIS HUSTER
ALEXANDRA VANDERNOOT
DANIEL PRÉVOST
CATHERINE FROT
EDGAR GIVRY
CHRISTIAN PEREIRA
PÉTRONILLE MOSS
When people ask me to name the funniest movie I’ve ever seen, I usually rattle off the names of classic comedies of the silent and early talkie era (from Chaplin to the Marx Brothers)…and as I do, I see their eyes glaze over. “No, no, no,” they’re thinking, “I don’t mean something ancient.”
All right then. How about a picture from 1998? I can’t remember any film that’s made me laugh out loud as much as Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game. The audience I saw it with was practically in tears—even my daughter, then just nine years old, loved it—yet it’s another foreign film that received only scant release in the United States.
The premise is simple but ingenious: a successful book editor (played by popular French leading man Thierry Lhermitte) chances to meet a man on a train trip who strikes him as a perfect candidate to bring to his weekly dining group. The object of this dinner game, played by a gathering of successful, self-confident men, is to bring along the stupidest guest they can find…and this latest patsy (Jacques Villeret), a tax accountant whose wife ran off with another man, is very stupid indeed.
In the best tradition of French farce, this idea grows and grows, like a snowball gaining momentum as it rolls downhill. Before long the well-meaning interloper plays havoc with the publisher’s well-ordered life, upsetting his relationship with his ex-wife, his mistress, his son, and various others. Yet this cherub-faced fellow remains clueless about the chaos he is creating, while the victim becomes increasingly frantic.
The story plays out with effortless precision, because it was honed to perfection onstage in Paris by its creator, Francis Veber.
Veber is hardly unknown on these shores: he is the man who wrote and directed La Cage aux Folles back in 1978, which was later transformed into a popular stage musical and a successful American movie called The Birdcage, with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. He has continued to write and often direct extremely popular farces for stage and screen in France, and many of his movies have been acquired by Hollywood studios with English-language remakes in mind.
I was lucky enough to attend a screening of his subsequent film, Tais-Tois (or Ruby et Quentin) in Los Angeles, which is