In Dummy, which was shot before The Pianist was put together, Adrien Brody plays a sad sack of a man who has no social skills. Neither does his best friend Milla Jovovich. Together, though, they make mutual journeys of self-discovery that, were they not so quirky and adorable and forced, might actually be emotionally compelling. Brody finds his inner voice through a ventriloquist's dummy (who has all the good lines, of course), learning that the wisdom he needed was really inside him all along.
Then Jovovich transforms her bad punk-rock band into a klezmer outfit for Jewish weddings. Then Brody's cruel, bitter sister (Illeana Douglas) gets tossed in for some poignant sibling reconciliation. The result is the kind of oddball independent film that's almost a parody of the genre. See it, and you'll fell like a big dummy who just lost all her money.