You, Me and Dupree Lost in Space

The premise is that newlyweds Carl and Molly Peterson (Dillon and Kate Hudson) take guilt-tinged pity on Carl's downtrodden best friend and best man Randy Dupree, who has lost his job... and his apartment... and his car. And all on account of taking some unauthorized time off to attend their wedding in Hawaii, where Molly's dad, real estate tycoon Bob Thompson (Michael Douglas), toasts the couple by making demeaning jokes at Carl's expense. Bad form, bad omen. Oh, and he's also the owner of the firm where Carl works, which builds soulless housing developments with names like The Oaks at Mesa Vista. For a while, it's almost like "Fatal Attraction" with a blond best friend instead of an adulterous lover.

"You, Me and Dupree" has the feel of a film that could have gone in any number of directions, and perhaps at one time went in all of them. What remains seems to have been carved, piecemeal, out of a more amorphous and haphazard assembly of takes. It's not that it doesn't maintain the requisite three-act structure. But what good is structure when the story and characters make no sense from one moment to the next?

All the characters suffer terribly from identity crises. At any given moment their identities are defined entirely by whatever they happen to say about themselves, or what others say about them. Carl possesses a unique and wonderful "Carl-ness" -- but only because Dupree says so. Besides, anybody can change, arbitrarily, on a dime. One minute Dupree is a boor, a physical klutz and an idiot incapable of deciphering basic conversation; the next he's reading a Mensa magazine, writing poetry, and cooking a fabulous Tuscan meal with the flair of a master chef. Molly is appalled by Dupree's gross, "unhousebroken" manners, then she's the one who unaccountably sides with him. Carl tries to do the right thing by Dupree, then becomes the villain (for a while), creepily slicking his hair back in a few scenes like Dracula or Hannibal Lecter -- or Michael Douglas in "Wall Street."

There is some funny stuff around the edges of this movie; it's the jerry-rigged mechanical engine at the center that's broken. Let me give one more example that's indicative of what's gone wrong: In a job interview that Dupree seems determined to fail, he asks about the company's policy on Columbus Day and professes to be aghast that people are expected to work on the day honoring of the guy who discovered America. Good joke. But he follows it up by saying he won't even ask about "Victory Over Japan Day." Nobody laughs. You know why? Because anybody who remembers what that is knows it's called V-J Day (which would have been funny, and I'll bet that's the original form of the joke). Explaining the joke for a younger target demographic, by calling it "Victory Over Japan Day," kills the gag. I think he should have said "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." Think about it. It's funny.