Fun with Dick and Jane (2005)

Dean Parisot's 2005 remake arrives with a grievance and a grin, and it is never entirely sure which one should lead. The engine is a corporate collapse modeled so closely on Enron that the audience could fill in the names: a chief executive dumps his shares, diverts four hundred million dollars, and leaves the pension fund in ashes while his employees absorb the blame. That is a substantial reservoir of class resentment, and the film draws from it freely. Carrey and Leoni spend the middle act robbing the comfortable to service the debts of the ruined, a premise with teeth.

Yet the teeth are capped. The screenplay, worked over by an army of uncredited writers, keeps reaching for the sermon and then yanking its hand back, treating the larceny as farce. A Ralph Nader cameo and a line about perverting the American dream land as punchlines. The rage is genuine but housebroken. Téa Leoni is not a decorative wife. She quits her job, matches her husband heist for heist, and her college calligraphy supplies the climactic forgery. The film frames this as screwball partnership, two professionals sharing a scheme, and declines to make an argument of it.

What the picture does not do is read its own era's cultural cues. The cast is white throughout, with Latino performers appearing as a maid and as the officers who deport Dick, and his crawl back across the border is staged as humiliation, with no curiosity about what that border means to anyone. There is no environmental conscience, no interest in bodies beyond the pratfall, no inner life beyond the paycheck. The closing joke, a friend announcing his wonderful new job at Enron, is the nearest thing to a thesis: the swindle is cyclical and the swindlers are fine. A comedy about being robbed, made by people who suspected it would happen again.