After premiering at Sundance 2021, Mother Schmuckers (2021), the feature debut from Belgian filmmaking brothers Lenny and Harpo Guit, opens in theaters this week. The film, co-written and directed by the Guits, follows a truly witless pair of brothers. Issachar (Maxi Delmelle) and Zabulon (Harpo Guit) live with their sex-worker mother Cashmere (Claire Bodson). The film opens on the two gasping for air. They have decided to fry human feces to try and trick their mother into eating it. Their antics escalate from there until they lose track of Cashmere’s beloved dog, January Jack. Under the threat of her kicking them out, Issachar and Zabulon must track the dog down. They beg for help from their best friend Choukri (Habib Ben Tanfous) and desperately avoid people they have pissed off.
Starting a film with a fried excrement gag is a choice. Here, it serves as an apt signal for the tone the Guits pursue from then on. The closest comparison for American audiences may be Dumb and Dumber (1994), but only if you forced that movie into an unholy wedding with Jackass: The Movie (2002). Issachar and Zabulon flounder about town from one asinine blunder to another. These include, but are not limited to, shooting at pigeons in the park with a borrowed gun, fighting with a grocery store clerk over sausages, and stumbling into a bestiality orgy. For all that absurdity, Mother Schmuckers ends up in a curious comedic no man’s land. The film is far too crude to settle into the Dumb and Dumber mode of nonsensical silliness and also fails to commit to its vulgarity the way Johnny Knoxville and friends have turned raunch into art.
Much of this comes down to the fact that the Guits constantly steer their comedy towards the least exciting punchlines. Regardless of the relative creativity they put into set-ups, the beats resolve through gross-out humor that grows tiresome and one-note. When they take a different direction, many of the jokes rely on uncomfortable identity-focused jabs. That trend connects the film to the hazards of comedy that comes from taking the lazy path. One character seems to exist only so that jokes about his heavier frame can constantly circle back. Another exchange results in multiple uses of the homophobic f-slur. A later sequence treats sexual violence against a different character as a punchline. It is in those moments that Mother Schmuckers truly shatters the juvenile humor it aims for, revealing a toxic center.
All of this is particularly disappointing because Delmelle and Harpo Guit display a willingness to embrace slapstick that could be incredibly winning. If the Guits chose to lean into that avenue, they could have produced a film worthy of taking up the mantle of gross-out, physical comedy. Instead, they have produced a rambling narrative of disjointed gags.
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.
