Dinner for Schmucks is a fun movie. It's not the end-all, be-all of cinema and it really doesn't have anything we've never seen before; Paul Rudd plays Straight Man Paul Rudd with his comedic foil being Steve Carell as Dweeby Doofus Steve Carell. The movie, overall, still comes together quite well despite the individual characters being ones we've seen before in other movies like Role Models or 40 Year Virgin.
That's it for the non-spoiler bits. If you haven't seen this movie, be warned that I'm giving away plot points (obvious ones, in my opinion, since we're dealing with American cinema).
Paul Rudd has a girlfriend in this movie, portrayed by Stephanie Szostak. She's an art broker/dealer/manager/relationship supervisor and Mr. Rudd is a mid-level finance guy at a company that's looking to impress an eccentric millionaire into putting his money into their pockets. He's up for miraculous promotion, with two conditions: he nails the deal with said eccentric millionaire and he attends a dinner hosted by his boss. The purpose of said dinner is for guests to find the weirdest person they can in a contest to find out who is the most absurd and socially repressed. Like a dog show for people with strange hobbies.
Anyhoo, Rudd finds Carell and there are wacky hijinks, and the movie is funny throughout on that front. But then there's the obligatory romantic subplot: Rudd's ladyfriend doesn't want him to compromise what she feels are his ethics by attending this dinner and making a mockery of some random schmo. Long story short, he goes ahead and ignores her misgivings and she gets pissed off at his antics (helped along by the socially inept Carell) and storms out on him.
The real spoiler/not-spoiler is this: at the end of the movie, despite her loathing him with every fiber of her being by that point and dumping him and moving out and the whole shebang, she shacks right back up with him because he gives a silly heartfelt monologue about how much he loves her as she's conveniently ninjaing her last box out of the bedroom.
Last I checked, real people don't act that way. Sure, they could eventually get back together after long talks late at night and maybe some relationship counseling; and, yeah, it's a movie (a fictional one at that!) and they need to push things along. But here's the thing: an epilogue is provided by Carell after the screen fades to black for the first time. Why not stick the feel-good rekindling of true love in there with everything else that happened after the main plot ran its course? Is it truly, truly necessary for outrageously forced and contrived positive romantic resolutions to be shoveled down our throats in not only this but every other movie out there?
The movie's title is Dinner for Schmucks and you're damn right there are multiple meanings behind the application of the word “schmuck” to the dinner in question. The hosts are schmucks, the attendees are schmucks, the guests are schmucks. Paul Rudd is a schmuck for going along with some harebrained attempt at pseudo-people-watching just to get a promotion. Most of the schmucks at the dinner get their comeuppance. Paul Rudd doesn't, by dint of him being the main protagonist.
Would it have been that devastating for the viewers to have seen Mr. Rudd get his just desserts for his being an asshole? Even a delayed reunion with his gal-pal would have sufficed. Protagonists don't deserve immunity to the laws of narrative karma simply because they are the guys we (generally) root for. What's good for the goose should be good for the gander. That isn't the case in much of American cinema, and it is worse off as a result.
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