Stuck on You
Directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly
Bad comedy like Bad Santa is self-congratulatory. Great comedy like the Farrelly brothers’ Stuck on You opens your mind until you’re tickled past your preconceptions. The story that Peter and Bobby Farrelly dreamed up about two brothers, Bob and Walt Tenor (played by Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear), concerns conjoined twins who have separate personalities. Introvert Bob shares a liver with extrovert Walt. It’s an outrageous and potentially reprehensible set-up. But Stuck on You shows surprisingly credible brotherly compassion that exposes Bad Santa’s simple-minded misanthropy. Whatever queasiness or fear you feel about Siamese twins, the Farrelly brothers go so far beyond it that they alleviate it. This is a tougher achievement than simply turning America’s Santa Claus figure rank. (Besides, didn’t Tim Allen already do that, inadvertently, in Disney’s The Santa Clause movies?)
The Farrellys are the last pop filmmakers to be described as sanctimonious (Kingpin, their least flawed film, was nothing if not a subversion of propriety). Stuck on You shows the true value of their taboo-busting. Opening so soon after Bad Santa, it rescues us from the snobbishness inherent in that film’s facile Christmas-bashing–a worse affront than mere bad taste. It’s their big-hearted respect for diverse, crazy humanity that gave the Farrellys their wide cast of characters. The true liberalism of There’s Something About Mary and Me, Myself and Irene is worlds away from the smug hipsterism that Terry Zwigoff promotes in Bad Santa. Armed with an irresistible playlist of New Wave Top 40 hits, the Farrellys have made truly democratic comedies. Stuck on You typically mixes handicapped, disabled or egocentric characters (and presumably well-adjusted ones) in the same complicated farce–just when the idea of common emotion seemed passe. Yee-ha! and Brava!
Bob and Walt work as co-owners of a Martha’s Vineyard burger shop before relocating to Hollywood to pursue Walt’s dream of being an actor. Stuck on You explores brother-love through Bob’s willingness to sacrifice his comfort for Walt’s ambition. Damon and Kinnear’s tandem act quickly becomes a metaphor for the deepest kinds of brotherhood. The routine in which they flip burgers while working against the clock is a marvel of physical dexterity that Chaplin, Keaton or Lucy and Ethel might have marveled at. They’re in sync in an ideal way that poeticizes family harmony without being maudlin. Even more boldly, the film dares to suggest that, despite their going Hollywood, fame is not the be-all or end-all of modern ambition. When Walt lands a job on a tv drama with Cher, Stuck on You turns into a priceless showbiz satire, as raucous and honest as Jean Harlowe’s 1933 Bombshell. The Farrellys shift gears from the mundane to the nearly fantastic, but they maintain a rigorous sensitivity. Amid pressure from a temperamental star that Cher self-satirizes, greedy network executives and a cutthroat Hollywood environment, Bob and Walt talk tough with each other yet are never cruel. This is consistent with the Farrelly method of accepting human freakiness without criticism or pomposity.
Bob and Walt’s move West contrasts the migration in Bad Santa where Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) and his dwarf sidekick Marcus (Tony Cox) make a far less honorable move to Arizona. They go from city to city to operate a Christmastime scam in which they hire-on at a local department store as Santa and elf, then rob the place after hours. Laughing at this cynical malfeasance (motivated by Stokes’ suicidal impulses) gets us nowhere; the Farrelly brothers’ comedy contrasts such pessimism without going soft. In fact, they encourage a sharper appraisal of social and cultural custom. Bob initiates an internet romance with May Fong (Wen Yann Shih), an Asian woman to whom he is reluctant to reveal himself. Walt reasons, "Where else is she gonna find a guy like you?" And Bob’s answer is breathtaking: "Chernobyl." Yet he says it matter-of-factly, which is the key to the film’s richness–and the Farrellys’ boldness. "Join us in ‘bad taste,’" the Farrellys ask audiences. But that peculiar dare also invites our humane appreciation. Even gorgeousness (in the persons of Shih and Eva Mendes) is shown to be a form of freakishness–accidents/mutations, of nature.
Understand: Bob and Walt’s birth defect is not the joke in Stuck on You. The film’s humor comes from their show of ingenuity and capacity; its charm is their affection and riotous rapport. When doing a crossword puzzle, horny Walt asks frustrated Bob, "What’s a four-letter word for snatch?" audiences everywhere will gasp at the punchline’s fraternal nonchalance.
Stuck on You initiates a movement of mind from suspicion to trust, starting with scenes that imply gay romance in the brothers’ parallel routines and on to the portrayal of each man’s individual desire. Walt dates April (Mendes), a big-hearted Hollywood starlet unashamed of her breast augmentation, while Bob’s affection for May Fong counters the stereotype of a "Siamese" twin with a warm Asian beauty. This recognition of humanity is a triumph after the Farrellys’ disappointing Shallow Hal. Attempting to examine the limits of their own male heterosexism, they had introduced the movies’ first spinal bifida sufferer into the reckless-playboy plot, but it didn’t make up for the fact that the Farrellys never really found the joke in Shallow Hal. Hal (Jack Black) came to unconsciously appreciate women for their inner (rather than outer) beauty, but the Farrellys’ technique kept presenting physically perfect women in brutal contrast to the image of Hal’s overweight love-object. (Gwyneth Paltrow’s version of a blonde skinny ideal never challenged the audience’s media-derived beauty standards.)
Here, the Farrellys avoid being cruel while being funny. It follows that their next project is a Johnny Knoxville feature co-starring actual retarded people. Stuck on You lets us laugh at our own trepidation about the handicapped while satirizing a world that fetishizes particular kinds of abnormality–usually celebrities like Cher or guest star Meryl Streep. They invoke the statue One Man’s Search to suggest the difficult expression of personal longing even among men joined by a vital organ. Never letting sincerity overwhelm their sense of humor, the Farrellys this time exhibit something near finesse. There’s depth to the way Bob and Walt fight. Not Dumb and Dumber slapstick, it’s a sorrowful tussle; plainly, brothers should never fight, being of one blood, one love. But just when the movie seems to go sentimental, there’s an uproarious joke–The Rolling Stones’ "Wild Horses" or Walt’s tv-detective character demanding "smegma from the dead hooker’s perineum."
Bad Santa can’t touch such superior bad taste. It insultingly presupposes an audience that is so atheistic and insensitive that it would welcome jokes about crime, dishonesty, selfishness, grotesquerie and self-destruction as a subversion of mainstream American custom. Terry Zwigoff exploits the same underground humor of his 1994 documentary about Robert Crumb as if he were telling a rare truth about American behavior. (That film’s offbeat humor never balanced the tragedy of Crumb’s family life and personal neurosis.) Fact is, there’s something swinish and inhumane about Bad Santa that no amount of non-conscientious, "It’s funny!" hype can disguise. Bad Santa was produced by the Coen Brothers on a bad day, but it’s the Farrelly brothers who successfully explore America’s disturbing stereotypes–unlikely leading men, tv divas or just plain, contented, hash-house workers.
Zwigoff intends the ribald, grimy Santa pretense to distract from human sorrow. Stuck on You puts the advent of underground comics, dark humor and exploitative movies to restorative use. Its jokes–including Walt starring in a musical version of Bonnie and Clyde that is sung to Billy Stewart’s "Summertime"–outnumber Bad Santa’s and prove genuinely enlivening.
As the Farrelly brothers continue to grow as film artists, their wild plots achieve the Marx brothers’ ambition of social upheaval and personal affection. Funny and down-to-earth, the Farrellys also recall theorist Henri Bergson’s definition of laughter as the expression of someone trying to adjust themselves to their society. Bad Santa fails by justifying Willie T. Stokes’ denial of social responsibility, but Stuck on You makes each twin’s social adjustment a matter of personal commitment–and audience joy.
