The Farrelly brothers aren’t great filmmakers; they’re too canny and eager-to-please, and after six features they still have trouble figuring out where to put the camera to enhance the comedy, rather than merely capture it. But they are special, and in a cookie-cutter culture that counts for plenty.
In a way–and bear with me here, because such comparisons are necessarily inexact–they’re like straight-up comic cousins of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, in that their style is easily imitated but nearly impossible to equal, because it comes from such a deeply personal place. While it’s not hard to come up with an equivalent of their setpiece gross-out images, nobody bothers finding such original characters to play the gags out. The pastry-screwing scene in the Weitz brothers’ American Pie is that film’s super-nasty equivalent of the frank-and-beans disaster in the Farrellys’ There’s Something About Mary. But the former film doesn’t have a single character as roaringly original as Keith David’s stepfather in Mary–a boisterous, macho kidder whose defensive love for his stepdaughter is fierce, honorable and real. He’s also a black man whose race is acknowledged and used for anxious humor, but never in a condescending way. Bottom line: Provocation is easy, human comedy is hard.
The Farrellys are quite good at the hard stuff–better than their detractors are prepared to admit, perhaps better than even their biggest fans realize. Their latest comedy, Shallow Hal, is their strangest work yet; alternately sweet, earnest, cruel and melancholy–and more intriguing than successful–it’s likely to baffle people who go in expecting another Kingpin or There’s Something About Mary. Like their other recent efforts, it invites you to laugh out loud at grotesquerie and pain, but unlike competitors’ films, it subtly demands that you ask yourself why you’re laughing–and whether you should be laughing.
Superficially, it looks and feels like a standard-issue Farrelly brothers movie, and it has the usual high-concept premise–a shallow man obsessed with supermodel beauty falls for an obese woman, and sees Gwyneth Paltrow whenever he looks at her. But unlike so many Farrelly imitations, Shallow Hal doesn’t begin and end with the germ of an idea. Its strangeness runs deeper than tortured slapstick and gross-out gags, clarifying what separates the Farrellys from their imitators; their sweetness, their empathy and, most important, their willingness to take a long, hard look at the sources of their comedy, separate the healthy and unhealthy sources and comment on them. I realize that sounds like a mighty highfalutin description of a film where a 300-pound woman does a cannonball off a diving board and blasts a little kid out of the water up into a tree–but what the hell, you gotta start somewhere.
The title character is Hal Larsen (Jack Black), an employee of an investment bank (or something; the film is intentionally vague about where it’s taking place and what its characters do for a living). Like so many Farrelly characters, he’s a fresh stereotype drawn straight from life–a tubby dynamo who practices a sunnyside-up, fratboy brand of sexism. He covets supermodels, and considers any woman who doesn’t fit the description to be a step down from the ideal. The first time we see him, he’s at a club with his best buddy, Mauricio (Jason Alexander), shimmying close to every lithe beauty on the dance floor; when they turn away in disgust, he shrugs and moves on to the next hottie.
A female coworker warns Hal that prizing women for their pop culture-defined standards of beauty is a dead end: "They’re just well-formed molecules," she tells him. But Hal is a true believer. His neo-Neanderthal cluelessness is his own problem, but to the Farrellys’ credit, they don’t present it in a typical Hollywood manner–meaning they don’t let Hal (and us) off the hook by pretending he’s just a bad apple in a generally healthy barrel. His sexism is portrayed as the American norm–the sum of a lifetime of conditioning. The seeds were planted in childhood, when his dying dad, the Reverend Larsen (the great character actor Bruce McGill), a noxious, morphine-addled thug, made the boy swear not to settle for substandard "poontang," because bedding beautiful women "will put you in good stead with the Lord." Hal’s sexism was tended by American culture, with its beauty pageants, lingerie/swimsuit obsession and insistence that boys be praised for aggression and women for beauty. The adult Hal is a pathetic oxymoron: an average-looking guy who’s blind to his own unremarkable looks and who thinks that if he doesn’t bag a sex goddess, it means he’s a loser.
Then Hal gets trapped in an elevator with the self-help guru Tony Robbins (playing himself, with a surprising amount of charm). Robbins senses the destructive limitations of Hal’s attitude (Hal pathetically insists he doesn’t just want women to be supermodel-beautiful; "I’d like her to be into culture and shit, too") and erases them with the pop-psych equivalent of a faith healer’s exorcism. Newly liberated, Hal charms a leggy blonde with whom he shares a taxi, then boogies all night at the club with a posse of women who look like the understudies from Coyote Ugly.
Hal’s buddy Mauricio is baffled, but not for the reasons you might think. And it’s here that the Farrellys spring their best gag of all: the women Hal successfully flirts with are not supermodels, he only sees them that way. They’re just women–young, old, thin, fat, pretty, homely–but Hal can only get close to them, and have fun with them, if he believes they fit his beauty ideal. Which means Robbins didn’t erase Hal’s conditioning, he just flipped it. Instead of spending his whole life in a pointless quest to nail a supermodel, Hal is going to spend his whole life pretending every woman is supermodel beautiful.
Thus, when he sees 300-pound Rosemary Shanahan on the street, he sees thin, poised Gwyneth Paltrow. And when Rosie sucks down a one-gallon chocolate milkshake in seconds flat, or crashes to the floor after her chair buckles, Hal thinks it’s just eccentricity or bad luck. The hero’s delusions are still there; they’ve just taken on a different form. (In his first starring role, actor-musician Black is a mesmerizing original–an average guy with unique responses, like a cross between John Belushi and John Cusack. When the Farrellys give him an occasional anguished closeup–like the scene where Hal talks about his dead dad–the effect nearly shatters the movie’s sweet, goofy mood: there’s such intense anger and sadness in Black’s eyes that only Scorsese may know what to do with it.) While the ads for Shallow Hal suggest a one-joke movie about a guy who refuses to see how fat his girlfriend is, the movie itself uses the device for a much better joke–one that plays into the Farrellys’ ongoing central themes, namely: (1) men’s ability to delude themselves, and (2) the ongoing war in men’s minds that pits the reasonable, sensitive guy against the caveman.
The central gimmick–having characters be played by different performers, depending on whether the audience or Hal is doing the looking–doesn’t work all the time, and it raises questions the Farrellys probably didn’t anticipate. Or did they? For instance, is it permissible to put thin Gwyneth in fat-chick slapstick gags, to give us permission to laugh? Not exactly–but the laughter generated by these gags is halting and uneasy, and I think it’s right to assume that the Farrellys wanted it that way.
Second question: If the point is to illustrate how preconceived notions limit men’s choices in life, why not cast Rosie with an actual obese actress, instead of putting Paltrow in a fat suit and shooting her mostly from the back? The short answer is, because then Shallow Hal would be a warmhearted message picture rather than a comedy, and the Farrellys want it to be both.
That’s probably impossible. As The New York Observer’s Ron Rosenbaum once pointed out, warm is the opposite of funny. Still, the Farrellys get closer to the impossible than we have any right to expect. They’ve got Hollywood hack sensibilities–the pedestrian compositions, wall-to-wall pop songs, dating montages, the characters’ critic-proof "noble" jobs (volunteerism, working with mentally disabled people, the Peace Corps) are proof of that. But their comic sensibilities are more sophisticated than their movie vocabulary suggests. There’s a real democratic spirit in their films, and a mission to their madness. Their audiences are as conditioned by the American wealth-and-beauty cult as poor shallow Hal, yet in film after film they manage to cajole, persuade and sometimes trick viewers into accepting highly unconventional screen characters. Then they demand that we accept them as normal and admit, on some level, that our resistance to such characters is actually abnormal.
Hal, for instance, includes a major character named Walt who has spina bifida and has spent his whole life walking on all fours, which gave him massively developed arms and chest muscles. But he’s not just a symbol of tolerance: he’s a prickly, defiant character, likably played by newcomer Rene Kirby, a real-life spina bifida survivor the Farrellys met while filming Me, Myself & Irene. A scene near the end finds Rosie and Walt’s girlfriend chatting in the back of a car at a gas station while Hal and Walt use the facilities. (Walt puts on gloves so he won’t stain his hands on the gas station’s oil-saturated pavement–a marvelous, realistic touch.) Although Rosie is obese and Walt’s girlfriend is elderly, when we see them in conversation, we’re looking at two young, conventionally beautiful actresses. Is the film saying that Walt and Hal, neither of whom is likely to win any beauty prizes, see their girlfriends as movie stars? No–because Walt and Hal aren’t in the scene. More likely, the film is saying that these women see themselves as movie stars, because in a world that worships unreal beauty, they’d go mad if they didn’t.
That’s a much more interesting, even subversive way of attacking the film’s main theme–more sophisticated, in fact, than anything in Shrek, a cartoon broadside on America’s beauty cult that was, in its own kid-friendly way, brilliant. Popular culture, the Farrellys suggest, makes all Americans live outside themselves and reject our true natures. We have to see ourselves as beautiful people, otherwise we feel like losers. This notion is echoed, eerily, in scenes where Paltrow articulates Rosie’s anxiety over being fat. When you see Paltrow, this generation’s It Girl, swearing that she’s obese and insisting that no matter how much she diets and works out she never seems to lose any weight, it may raise the hair on the back of your neck–and it’s supposed to. It’s anorexia and bulimia talking. These diseases aren’t just caused by biology; pop culture is part of the equation, too. There are millions of thin women who look in the mirror and see Rosie staring back at them, because the culture has given them two choices, with no in between: Gwyneth or Rosie.
The same is true of men, to some extent–and the Farrellys’ inability to properly recognize this fact has to be considered the film’s biggest failing. I’d love to see what Rosie sees when she looks at shallow Hal. Does Tom Cruise do cameos?
