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Shallow
Hal
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Release
Date: 1st February 2002
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Certificate: 12
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black,
Jason Alexander, Joe Viterelli, Rene Kirby, Bruce McGill
Director: Bobby
Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
Running Time:
114 mins
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Bobby
and Peter Farrelly, masters of the outrageous and gross-out comedy (Dumb
And Dumber, There's Something About Mary) take an artistic step backwards
with Shallow Hal, a soft, disappointingly sentimental comedy about the true
nature of beauty, or the gap between physical surfaces and inner essences.
Small in scale, and extremely modest in style, the film benefits from an
attractive performance by Gwyneth Paltrow as the object of desire for an
ordinary guy, credibly played by character actor Jack Black (High Fidelity)
in his first lead role. Fox should expect solid if not spectacular returns
for a feature that is weaker than most of the siblings' former efforts.
The picture yielded $23 million in its US opening weekend where it assumed
second place at the box office to Disney’s Monsters, Inc.
The comedy, scripted by the Farrellys and their partner Sean Moynihan, begins
well with a hospital scene between a young boy named Hal and his dying father,
who instructs his son never to settle for less than the perfect woman. |
| Cut
to the present, where a grown-up Hal (Black), having been brainwashed by
his father (and the mass media), finds beauty only in supermodels and centrefolds.
The first thing Hal looks for in a woman is not just appearance but also
perfect statistics, particularly when it comes to her bosom. He and his
equally mediocre-looking pal, Mauricio (Alexander), are quick to spot the
tiniest imperfection in gorgeous women. It’s also all that they talk
about – and the subject upon which their superficial friendship is
based. Things change dramatically after Hal accidentally meets self-help
guru Tony Robbins (Robbins, parodying his public image) at an office elevator.
An impromptu hypnosis by Robbins forces Hal to make a radical transformation
in the way he sees women's beauty, focusing on their inner selves rather
than physical appearances. His new philosophy is immediately put to the
test upon encountering Rosemary (Paltrow), an overweight Peace Corps volunteer
who works in a hospital for sick children. Hal is instantly smitten by her
and an idyllic romance begins, one in which Hal envisions Rosemary's kindness
and humour as female physical nirvana. The gimmick is that, subjectively,
Hal sees Rosemary as a slender and sexy blonde (the way Paltrow really is),
whereas in we, the audience, view Rosemary more objectively as a morbid
obese. Hence, when the spell is broken and Hal is no longer open-minded,
he must face the frumpy, unrecognisable (to him) Rosemary and learn a valuable
lesson: never judge people by their looks. |
| While
in production, Shallow Hal received a lot of publicity because it required
Paltrow to spend hours in the make-up room, wearing a fat suit that will
make her convincing as a 300-pound woman. For a while, the Farrellys bring
out humour, based on Hal's perceptual gap - and Rosemary's endless physical
mishaps. Rosemary keeps falling from chairs in restaurants, and when the
two go canoeing, she tips Hal's end of the boat out of the water. In one
of the film's funniest gags, Rosemary also dives into a pool and splashes
enough water to throw a swimmer into a tree. Some of the vaudevillian slapstick
and visual gags are hilarious, but the Farrellys are not particularly deft
directors (technically, the feature is wretched). Their staging is broad
and they do not know how to orchestrate sight puns so that they will pay
off both visually and emotionally in the way that say Blake Edwards did
in the better Pink Panther comedies. The Farrelly want to play it both ways,
to have their cake and eat it too. For most of the film, the large-size
Rosemary is seen from behind, or at a distance. Only in the last reel does
Hal have to face Rosemary and her threatening father (Viterelli), who is
the owner of the company he works for. Furthermore, there is something disingenuous
about the whole enterprise, which is characteristic of Hollywood pictures
when it comes to the deglamorisation of beautiful women. |
| The
Farrellys have always worked with the sexiest female stars around: Cameron
Diaz (There’s Something About Mary), Rene Zellweger (Me, Myself, And
Irene) and now Paltrow. Much in the same way that Julia Roberts was "compelling"
in wearing a fat suit in America's Sweethearts, subjecting these slender,
golden beauties to physical deformity and psychological humiliation is tolerated
by the public because they know that it's a temporary malaise: the ugly
duckling-turned-swan syndrome. Now try to imagine Shallow Hal with actresses
like Kathy Bates or Camryn Manheim (Happiness) and the entire meaning of
the film changes. The last thing the audience expects of the Farrellys is
for them to become mushy and earnest. After all, these are the guys who
made Jeff Daniels deal with the intestinal aftershocks of a powerful laxative
in Dumb And Dumber, and Ben Stiller get his "beans and franks"
painfully caught in his zipper and Cameron Diaz sport organic "hair
gel" for There’s Something About Mary. To be sure, there was
always niceness and geniality at the core of the brothers' comedies, but
the smalltown America values were latent or submerged in rudely and wickedly
nasty yarns that dissected with sharp visual and verbal humour the overweight,
the misshapen and the disfigured. The Farrellys claim that Shallow Hal is
their "most emotional" film, representing a new direction in their
work with its focus on "a guy who finds his soul and realises what's
truly important." But for the rest of us, Shallow Hal is a message
comedy propagating values that are too oBuena Vista Internationalous and sappy. |
