"The Dinner Game" (1998, PG-13)

Grade: B+

(French with English subtitles)

A fabulous and frantic farce, "The Dinner Game" combines a compelling storyline with execution that is sure to please.

Pierre and his cohorts of Parisian snobbery hold a dinner each week, with each person bringing the biggest idiot they can find. The dinners are truely stunning displays of idiocy with people such as boomerang collecters coming to share their passion for stupidity. But Pierre happens upon someone unusual: someone of the likes of idiocy that he has never seen.

Meet François, an accountant at the Ministry of Finance whoose hobby is building famous monuments out of matchsticks. Although his first creation had just over 300 matchsticks, his masterpiece of the Eiffel Tower had over 300,000, and used 37 bottles of glue. Pierre knows that he has found a gem with François. But soon things go drastically wrong, and Pierre's life thrown into complete chaos with just a couple hours with François.

"The Dinner Game" manages to dish out acting that is on par with its creative script. Thierre Lhermitte dishes out a fine performance, if feeling somewhat uninspired at times. But after all, Lhermitte is a wealthy snobbish sort who's life is thrown into turmoil by his idiot.

Yes, the idiot! Jacques Villeret steals the show as the bumbling François Pignon. He gives a performance that is very alarmingly, well, stupid in every way. It is hard to imagine a more brilliant job done at creating the passion for the irrelevant, detachment from reality, and disasterous untimely enthusiasm of François Pignon.

Solid support is shown from Francis Huster and Daniel Prevost playing Just Leblanc ("Just" is his first name) and Cheval respectively. Huster is perhaps too dramatic and unauthentic in his frantic laughing, but otherwise adds a nice grounding for the two leads. Prevost does a masterful jobs portraying Cheval, the ruthless tax auditer who the best inspector the ministry has ("he would audit his own mother").

The film possesses dynamic acting which is set in the classic fashion for a farce. Set almost entirely in one apartment, the simplicity of set lets the acting be displayed to its fullest. It is, in fact, almost more reminiscent of theater than film.

Although "The Dinner Game" begs the title of slapstick, it carefully avoids the extremes reached by such fare as the "Pink Panther" films. This is a welcoming thing to see, but one might easily feel that "The Dinner Game" is perhaps a bit too rudimentary in its humor. But after all, shouldn't a movie about getting the biggest idiots available together for dinner be equally stupid and moronic in every facet of its construction?

Never has idiocy been so great and varied, and never has it been so satisfying.