Shallow Hal
***
Cinema Releases - February 1, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 113
minutes. Directed by Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly. Written by Bobby Farrelly,
Peter Farrelly, Sean Moynihan. Starring Jack Black, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jason
Alexander, Joe Viterelli, Anthony Robbins.
"Shallow Hal" begins with Jack Black
and Jason Alexander strutting around a nightclub, leering at and dancing
with the kind of women who should, by rights, be way out of their league.
Black isn't cruel, but nor is he sensitive, and Alexander, who has a puffy
face, the build of the Michelin man and fake hair that looks like shoe polish,
has just dumped a sexy and charming woman because one of her toes was
inordinately long. Their conversations about the fairer sex are as superficial
as this movie's title would suggest -- a discussion of one of Black's dates
includes the following exchange:
"Her tits aren't even
real!"
"Hey, I could squeeze
them... that's real enough for me."
The movie is a comedy in which Black runs into
self-help guru Tony Robbins and gets hypnotised into seeing only inner beauty.
We cut between what Black is seeing and what the outside world sees, and
to a large extent his new perception involves seeing dorky or overweight
women as beautiful, and snappy women as hideous. This is somewhat shallow
in itself, and Black, as far as he's concerned, is still responding to looks...
but hey, it's a means to an end, and it does expose him to nice
personalities.
Black starts dating Gwyneth Paltrow, who to him
is a looker and to everyone else is about two hundred pounds overweight.
Paltrow gives a poignant performance as someone pained and underconfident
from years of negative self-image; Black doesn't understand what she's on
about, but listens to it anyway, and does eventually begin to care about
her as more than just a hot piece of ass.
This is not a movie like "There's Something About
Mary", in which the romantic scenes were designed to bore us so that the
large comic set-pieces made us laugh all the harder. Nor is it, as the trailer
would suggest, a bunch of fat jokes with a sappy moral tacked onto the end.
Yes, "Shallow Hal" is a fantasy comedy about a guy who dates a fat woman
because he thinks she's thin, but what develops between Black and Paltrow
is a sweet and lively romance, and I was surprised by how much it engaged
me.
Alexander makes crass wisecracks that I will not
spoil by revealing, and there are big visual gags, like when we see Paltrow
jump into a swimming pool from Black's point of view. We're seeing her as
thin, and yet when she launches into the water we see half the water splash
out and a little kid get thrown into a tree.
The goofy humour mixes with the tenderness in
a genuinely effective way; it brought a smile to my face. "Shallow Hal" was
directed by the Farrelly brothers, who made "There's Something About Mary",
"Kingpin" and last year's brilliant "Osmosis Jones", and thankfully these
guys have no mawkish bones between them. Few other filmmakers could have
pulled off an idea as fundamentally goofy as this without tackiness creeping
in. Slapstick and romantic comedy are two of the hardest things to accomplish,
and by doing them both at once without compromising either genre, the Farrelys
again prove that their filmmaking skills are to be taken seriously. There's
even a good supporting performance from Tony Robbins, who in infomercials
can come off like a simplistic phoney but here exudes wisdom and
control.
I must be getting soft as I approach my
twenties.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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