Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often credited with saying, “An unjust law is no law at all.”  Ever the brilliant orator, with this quote the civil rights leader concisely summed up the way in which the American legal system was slanted against non-white peoples.  How could a country with such conceits of freedom like the United States consider itself as impartially administering justice when such a large swath of the population had little or none?  While he asked important questions at the right time, he was sitting on the shoulders of Catholic philosophers before him.  It was St. Augustine who first coined the phrase.  Roughly a millennia later, St. Thomas Aquinas in his God proving treatise Summa Theologica expounded on this idea, applying the tenets of Faith as the basis for what we call law.  Put simply, if a rule-based order does not promote universal love and truth, or the good of all, then it is illegitimate.  Such notions crossed the Atlantic, mixed with what native peoples already practiced, and became the foundation of a strain of civil disobedience as epitomized in people like Henry David Thoreau and Dr. King.  As a devout Catholic, I find this heritage of Western culture interesting given how anti-Catholic this country has been over the years.  You may accuse me of jumping off the philosophical deep end with this one, but as odd as it might seem, this is all applicable to today’s film, Fun with Dick and Jane (2005).  It may not deal much with religion, but the behavior of the two main characters wrestles with issues that have been on the minds of some deep thinkers for centuries.

Those two main characters are Dick (Jim Carey) and Jane Harper (Téa Leoni), and early on it is a more staid form of Fun with Dick and Jane.  He works for a major media corporation called Globodyne, and she is employed by a travel agency.  They have a classic, upper-middle class set of appliances that go with their car and home.  Their son Billy (Aaron Michael Drozin) spends so much time with the nanny, Blanca (Gloria Garayua), that the kid speaks more Spanish than English, and that with a commensurate accent.  Essentially, they are corporate drones, but Dick is about to get an invitation to the top of the hive where he is set to meet Globodyne’s chief executive officer (CEO), Jack McCallister (Alec Baldwin).  On the way, Dick runs into Frank Bascombe (Richard Jenkins), who is the first to inform Dick of a promotion to vice-president of communications.  The next day at breakfast at Jack’s home, with Frank in attendance, they inform Dick that they want him to be the face of the corporation and go on television for them.  Dick is next ambushed by the cable news network and forced to answer awkward questions for which he is ill-prepared as Jack sells his shares and Globodyne shuts down on live television.  In short, Dick is out of the job.  So, too, is Jane, having done so at Dick’s behest when he found out about the promotion.  Nonetheless, she takes the news of his loss of employment well, confident that he will find something new.  Months go by without an interview.  The only one that he thinks he has received turns out to be a bank that only brings him in so they can see the former Globodyne employee who made a fool of himself on national television.  As the situation gets more desperate, they begin selling off various belongings, steadily whittling down their belongings until there is virtually nothing left in the house.  They also pay Blanca in appliances.  Things get so bad that she advises Dick to see her cousin about finding a job, which involves standing outside with illegal immigrants waiting to get picked to do menial labor.  In the scramble to hop onto the back of a truck, he loses his license, which leads to him being deported.  As this goes on, Jane has signed up for a questionable Botox study that hideously inflates her face.  After a crazed night that sees Dick run around the neighborhood with a knife, cutting up chunks of grass to repopulate his yard, and getting an eviction notice, he decides he has had enough.  Getting a toy squirt gun that looks enough like a real pistol, he concudes that they must turn to a life of crime.  The problem is that these are the last people one would suspect of being criminals.  With Jane as the getaway driver, Dick is unsuccessful in robbing a convenience store, and helps an old lady carry her bags out of a supermarket.  It is not until they get to a head shop that they are finally able to muster the courage to have the man behind the counter empty the contents of his register into their possession.  From here, they develop a taste for heists, doing so regularly and apparently righting their financial situation.  Their spree is put on hold when they attempt to knock over a bank, only to be interrupted by one of Dick’s former co-workers storming the same financial institution on the same day.  Dick next turns to drinking, doing so at a downtown club he used to frequent. There, he sees Frank.  Frank tries to run away, but is tackled by an angry Dick.  Blaming Jack for all their troubles, Frank says he has a plan for getting even with their corrupt boss.  With Jack transferring $400 million at another bank, they intend to switch documents that would send the money to an account set up by Frank.  In typical comedic fashion, unfortunately, the document gets destroyed and Frank is arrested before their design is set in motion.  Further, Jack spots Dick, and out of pity, writes the one-time vice-president of communications a $100 check.  This had actually been Dick’s ulterior motive, and he uses Jack’s signature on the check to forge another document, and have Jack’s millions used to compensate Globodyne’s employees that lost everything.  The final scene is of Dick and Jane ambushing Jack with this news, and with clips of all the people wronged by Globodyne getting a settlement.

When watching a movie like Fun with Dick and Jane, the natural question to ask oneself is: are Dick and Jane justified in their actions?  Unfortunately, it seems like society has this sense of “gotcha” justice.  One could refer to it as “mob rule.”  Put differently, would you call what they do in line with what Dr. King or St. Augustine would do, indeed, what Jesus would do?  Let us not forget, after all, that Dr. King was a Baptist minister by trade.  I would also add that he marched with Catholic priests.  Now, we may be thinking that, once again, I am venturing far afield from the scope of this movie.  Yet, first thing you see in the end credits is a special thanks to several defunct companies that are meant to be inspirations for Globodyne.  It is also significant that it is set in 2000, the year of the famous Enron collapse.  If Dick and Jane are justified in becoming petty thieves, though eventually going after larger targets, then could not the same be said for anyone who might have tried the same thing in real life?  The problem is that there is a wide gulf between legitimate civil disobedience and outright breaking of the law.  In Romans 13:1-7, the Bible talks about the importance of obeying the government.  That might sound legalistic, but later in the chapter in verse ten it goes on to explain that “love is the fulfillment of the law.”.  This is more in reference to Mosaic law, which was a philosophical hurdle for many early Christians.  Still, taken as a whole, which is the Catholic way of reading the Bible, our modern-day system of laws has its foundation is Judeo-Christian values.  While there are many today who rail against this principle, they do so forgetting passages like in Romans.  When anything points the way towards God, it cannot, by definition, be bad.  The problem with Dick and Jane is that, for the most part, their actions are motivated by greed or the desire to get even.  While I do applaud their comparatively selfless act of setting up a charity for the millions they steal from Jack, it is also done from the same want of vengeance.  Revenge is God’s purview, not ours, and that is for the better.

While I do not approve of the crimes you see in Fun with Dick and Jane, it is nonetheless mildly entertaining.  Watching it might transport you to a time when words like “Enron” mattered, if you can remember those days.  As such, call this a lukewarm recommendation.