YOU, ME & DUPREE

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 2 out of 5

Because of: sexual humor, brief nudity

Rated:

For the most part humorous and often offensive, You, Me & Dupree has a decent screenplay and good acting from all involved, but what really lies at the heart of it is a decent pitch for working through hard times in relationships... even when Dupree happens to be living in your front room.

Carl (Matt Dillon) and Randy (Owen Wilson) have been friends since the days they were skateboarding together with scraped knees and playing street baseball with local neighborhood kids. Twenty or so years later, Carl is about to get married. Molly (Kate Hudson) is funny, talented, and makes his eyes sparkle. She also happens to be the only child of multi-millionaire and successful businessman, Thompson (Michael Douglas). Carl worked a desk in Thompson's office for a number of years without ever being noticed, and now that the wedding is on, most of the attention he receives from his soon-to-be father-in-law is patronizing and negative. The ceremony goes off without a hitch, and the first few weeks of married life are fantastic.

Then Randy is fired from his job, and winds up sleeping on a cot in the back room of the local bar. Unwilling to let his friend suffer the humiliation of homelessness, and against the advice of Molly, Carl invites Randy to stay with them "for a week or so" until he can find another job and get back on his feet. Randy cramps their style. He changes the message on their answering machine. He invites guy friends over for pizza and nachos during football games. Molly wants him to leave, and Carl is reaching the end of his rope. But then something happens that causes Carl to wonder, as he deals with a vengeful father-in-law and precarious job position, if Molly isn't becoming overly fond of Randy.

Most of us at some time in our life have had someone stay over at our house for a few days, or even a couple of months, and inevitably that individual got on our last nerve. Identifying to some extent with Carl and Molly is what makes this movie work, because Randy is irritating. He's thoughtless. He leaves soda rings on tables, and gets chips in the couch. The thing is, the audience loves him anyway, because how can you not love such a total mess-up? His dynamic with the other two cast members is great, and it's that triangle (mostly between Wilson and Hudson) that prevents the film from falling into sheer stupidity, although it teeters close a couple of times. The script is very funny when it tries, particularly at the hands of actors accustomed to playing off humor, but relies too much on sexual references and gags for laughs.

As newlyweds, Molly and Carl have an active sex life, implied through dialogue and a kissing scenes (in their underwear) that is inevitably interrupted. In an attempt to get Randy out of the house, Molly introduces him to a librarian, then walks in on them involved in some kind of sexual shenanigans (only the woman's foot is shown, as Randy spreads butter on it). Randy runs out into the front yard to explain, covering his private parts with a pillow. More embarrassing is a scene in which she finds him masturbating in front of her husband's secret stash of Asian porn. Molly makes Carl throw the lot away, and an ambitious neighbor comes to salvage it from the dumpster. Carl has a paranoid fantasy about Randy and Molly making out on her father's boat. Molly is scantily dressed.

There's also some toilet humor, implying that Randy has stunk up the master bathroom, and a handful of abuses of GD, along with lengthy discussions on vasectomies (including a briefly-seen anatomically correct drawing of the procedure). There's some slapstick violence. The bottom line was overall I thought the movie had a lot of promise. It had some great comic moments and I liked that Carl was encouraged in the end to really fight for his marriage and not call it quits. Randy even goes out on a limb to help him win Molly back. But the barrage of sexual content and humor put a damper on You, Me & Dupree.