The
trailer for You, Me and Dupree makes it look like a
houseguest-from-Hell comedy, with Owen Wilson as the pest who comes to stay and
won’t go away. That’s accurate, but also inadequate – and I’m guessing
whoever made the trailer just didn’t know what to make of Wilson’s character,
the eponymous Dupree, who’s an odd mix of innocent, feral, annoying and poetic.
Houseguests
from Hell are usually slobs, or bullies, or just insensitive. The movie
prototype is The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), where a family takes in a
famous critic with a broken hip only to find themselves on the receiving end of
his witty barbs. Nowadays (witty barbs being rather outdated at the multiplex)
it could be an Eddie-Murphy-in-Shrek type of character, rude and crude if
ultimately good-hearted. Dupree is a little bit like that; among other things
– this was the scene that got lots of play in the trailer – he walks in on
his newlywed hosts (Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson) while they’re trying to make
love, and uses their toilet messily and disgustingly. But he’s also a
sensitive soul, a manchild (kids adore him), a writer of poetry and generally a
free spirit with an individualist motto: “Don’t let Life rob you of your –ness,”
he counsels, meaning your essence, who you are, etc.
The plot
couldn’t be simpler: Dillon invites Dupree to stay with them after he loses
his job, apartment and car – and lives to regret it. Dupree is unemployable,
though only because he won’t play the game; he lost his job as a salesman (he
claims) because he thought the product was poor, and didn’t mind telling that
to prospective customers. He’d rather hang out with the neighbourhood kids in
any case, skateboarding and playing baseball. Strangely he’s also a bit of a
ladies’ man, like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis rolled into one – or maybe not
so strangely, since the film ties into a broader infantilism in Western (especially
American) culture. It’s now okay to be an adult who does kid things like
playing videogames and reading Harry Potter – and the laid-back Wilson,
a major star since Wedding Crashers, typifies that wide-eyed manchild
persona.
The film
isn’t really very funny (though of course that’s subjective) but it’s
interesting for what it says about Being A Man, and the way Dupree is offered as
a solution to the male malaise. Dillon’s father-in-law (Michael Douglas)
literally tries to emasculate him, urging him in all seriousness to have a
vasectomy. Another friend is married to a controlling wife who stalks his every
move. The film is set in a world where being a man (at least a young man) in the
old-fashioned, macho sense is close to impossible. What to do? Enter Dupree,
showing the way – a sensitive New Man who cooks and talks about feelings (Dillon,
we’re told, can’t do this), yet also retains his independence.
Unfortunately
the film is all over the place. The second half goes in a weird direction, with
Dillon growing obsessively jealous of Dupree, imagining he’s after his wife
and job. There’s something there, in that the film hints at Dupree’s passive-aggressiveness
(early on, when he asks for best-man insignia at the wedding, he pretends to
concede the point but gets his way anyway) – but since it mostly works to make
him sympathetic, and Dillon’s reaction is so extreme in any case, there’s no
comic tension and his rage just seems tedious.