Slacking Off

Unwanted houseguest: Owen Wilson as the boorish Randy Dupree in You, Me and Dupree. Photo Melissa Moseley. Courtesy Universal Studios.

Owen Wilson may be the best thing to happen to film comedy in a decade. His persona — a slacker conman who conceals ambition behind a drowsy smile — remains immensely compelling 11 years after his debut in Bottle Rocket. Wilson co-wrote that film with director Wes Anderson, his best friend from the University of Texas. The duo later collaborated on Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums — alert, inquisitive comedies that recall F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger and the Peanuts gang in their sensitivity to class anxieties and the fragile bonds of childhood.

Alas, Wilson abandoned screenwriting after Tenenbaums, channeling his energy into engineering his own material in blockbuster buddy movies. To his credit, he did come up with the best bit in last summer’s box-office hit Wedding Crashers, offering up this whopper of a make-out line: “Scientists say we only use 10 per cent of our brains, but I think we only use 10 per cent of our hearts.”

Sadly, watching Wilson in his wearying new comedy, You, Me and Dupree, I wondered if the 37-year-old actor is now using only 10 per cent of his talent. While none of his buddy movies are up to his work with Anderson, Wilson has always been a game, gifted ensemble player. He was Jackie Chan’s best foil ever in Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights. In Meet the Parents, he inflated himself into a preppie superman to better antagonize uptight rival Ben Stiller.

In his latest, however, Wilson is a team player without a team. There really is no “you” and “me” in You, Me and Dupree. There is only Dupree (Wilson), an unemployed freeloader who makes a nuisance of himself just as his newly married friend Carl (Matt Dillon) is setting up house with his wife, Molly (Kate Hudson).

Dillon, playing a stuffy land developer who can’t manage his manipulative father-in-law boss (Michael Douglas), is virtually ignored by directors Anthony and Joe Russo, and consequently the audience. Hudson, meanwhile, is little more than eye candy, mincing about in underwear or tight jeans, looking alternately adorable and cross. For the first time in his career, Wilson is the entire show. At times, the film feels like a lowly Sandra Bullock vehicle, where the back-up band listlessly keeps time while the star plays a solo.

Worse still, whereas Wilson often played dumb in previous films, biding time behind a surfer-dude mien as he measured his quarry, he really is a goof here, engaging in slapstick that would shame Rob Schneider. In one scene, Dupree is perched on a clogged volcano toilet, screaming on the phone for help. Later, when mood candles set the couch ablaze during an unsuccessful seduction, he hotfoots it naked from a burning house with end pillows covering his privates. Ho, ho, ho.

The lone winning segment comes when Dupree speaks to a grade school class, imploring them to cultivate their “ness” — that is, the qualities that make them unique. He later rescues his friend by asking Dillon’s character to remember his “Carl-ness,” the brave, idiosyncratic characteristics that first made him shine.

A nice sentiment, to which I found myself muttering: Slacker, cure thyself. For You, Me and Dupree forgets the very qualities that made Wilson loveable in the first place. Once upon a time, the actor used the best part of himself. Indeed, the battered-bandaged, perpetually hopeful Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore is modeled after Wilson, who broke his nose playing football at St. Mark’s Academy, a Texas prep school where, again like Max, he was expelled for misconduct.

While some critics figured the precocious, emotionally stunted Tenenbaum children evolved from Salinger’s Glass family stories, it’s significant that Wilson himself was raised by highly successful — and presumably demanding — parents. His father, Robert Wilson, is a Dallas TV executive and university lecturer who assembled the sternly titled television series and book Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush. Owen’s mother, Laura Wilson, is an accomplished photographer whose work has graced the New Yorker and London’s Sunday Times.

Odd couple: Wilson with Jackie Chan in the Wild West satire Shanghai Noon. Courtesy Touchstone Films.

To his parents’ disappointment, Wilson never graduated from university. Instead, he joined college roommate Anderson in the wild chase to make movies. His best movies are scattered with droll, knowing bits of comic confession. He’s played Texas-style, Stetson-clad fakes in Shanghai Noon, Shanghai Knights and The Royal Tenenbaums. In the latter, his character’s surname — Cash — suggests further ambivalence about play-acting for money.

Then, too, there is the matter of Wilson’s quixotic, doomed quest for the approval of older women. Teenage Max falls in love with a widowed schoolteacher in Rushmore, while author Eli Cash sends all of his favourable clippings to the austere matriarch of the Tenenbaum clan (Angelica Huston). In real life, Wilson once dated a (somewhat) older woman: singer Sheryl Crow. To date, it is the only publicized relationship of Wilson’s Hollywood career. In his films, he has expertly mocked his own squeamishness about commitment.

“I am like a wild horse,” Roy O’Bannon, his Shanghai Noon character, advises a stolid native woman he is hoping to seduce. “You can’t tame me. You put the oats in the pen, though, and I’ll come in for a nibble every day… But if you ever shut that gate, I’ll jump fence and you’ll never see me again.”

Such sly playfulness once brightened Wilson’s films. With his current work, however, the actor crosses the line between knowing self-satire and careless self-parody. More disturbing still, this most social of actor-comedians now seems uninterested in fellow players. His romantic interest in You, Me and Dupree was cut from the final print, allowing Wilson to be alone in love. In what hopefully remains the most embarrassing scene in Wilson’s career, Molly happens upon Dupree watching porn on TV, masturbating into a grimy sports sock.

In the past, Wilson has stood accused of being a member of the new male infantilism. Until now, it could be argued that the actor was more childlike than childish. Not anymore.

And there’s more bad news: Wilson’s long-rumoured reunion with Anderson seems to be on perpetual hold. It makes a fan wonder: Will Wilson ever reclaim his “Owen-ness”?

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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