Perhaps some readers used the Fun with Dick and Jane books as texts for learning how to read. The credits of this comedy, use the books’ illustrations style to introduce the father, Dick, the mother, Jane, their young son and the family dog.

This is a typical family unit, comfortable, happy and, as far as the future is concerned, prosperous.

How wrong they are!

The present screenplay is based on one written for the 1976 film with George Segal and Jane Fonda. As I look at notes I made for the review at that time, I am surprised just how apt they are for this 2005 movie. Have things not improved over thirty years? 1976 was the immediate post-Watergate era and the aftermath of the resignation of President Nixon. Recession mixed with corporate fraud (as with vice-president Agnew) made headlines then. This time, we see President Bush making speeches on prosperity. The film finishes with satiric comments on Enron and other companies whose disgraced executives are now in court.

It is best to point out that the theme of Fun with Dick and Jane is unemployment amongst the middle classes and how they cope and fail to cope with the consequences. This is a particularly American problem. Audiences in Africa and parts of Asia may not be so interested in Dick and Jane and their plight. They have far more important and deeper problems to deal with.

However, for those of us in western cultures, we know that retrenchment, restructuring and downsizing are a significant part of our experience. My past notes refer to the ‘nouveau poor’.

The trouble is that Dick is an enthusiastic and effective worker. It is just that he has been chosen as the fall-guy for corporate crooks to get away with huge profits as their company goes bankrupt – and he is trapped on a typical TV finance interview trying to put on a brave face while being shocked at discovering what has happened. He has just persuaded Jane to give up her travel agent job to spend more time with their son.

The black comedy shows them trying to salvage their dignity and their possessions. Then it shows Dick’s failed attempts to find a job. Finally, they are so desperate that Dick and Jane set out on a series of armed robberies to make ends meet and regain their status.

Some of these episodes – holding moral judgment in abeyance until we see how they emerge from these activities – are quite funny, especially when Dick is arrested and deported with Mexican illegals and when Dick’s robberies go wrong and he meets a friend and helps an old lady with her groceries to her car.

Since Jim Carrey is the star, we can expect some broad comedy and some of his mugging and impersonations - a little of which can go a long way. He is matched very well by Tea Leoni as Jane.

Alec Baldwin is the creepy criminal executive who offers smooth rationalisations and jocose television answers. Richard Jenkins is very good as the vice president of the company who finally collaborates with Dick and Jane to rectify the situation and move the goings-on to a moral high ground – a nice trick to get back the ill-gotten gains and try to see justice done.

Fun with Dick and Jane is not a comedy masterpiece. Rather, it is a piece of popular entertainment that reaches the widest audience (in American, European and G8 societies) and by satire and funny situations, not realism, remind us that there are greedy exploiters who manipulate world finances and who have no scruples in easily permitting the family in the street to be their victims.

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