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Well, it's another Farelly bros movie, and as usual it has good patches and rough patches. The humor often comes off silly and lightweight, but once in a while, the cast knocks it out of the park. Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow really deliver outstanding performances here, which seems like a small miracle to me, based on the kind of movie this is.
Jack Black plays a surface obsessed jerk who goes after beautiful women who are clearly out of his social league. He wants supermodel hot chicks to date him and his entire life is basically just one rejection after another, but that doesn't stop him. I guess you could call him Tenacious. Get it?
After getting stuck in an elevator with a self help guru (played by Tony Robbins, essentially playing himself), this "shallow Hal" resurfaces into the world seeing only the inner beauty of people, and the results appeal to him as what he craves: supermodel hotness.
He scores with a sweet honey haired blonde (played by Paltrow) and develops a deep relationship, all the while, by mere chance, chatting up her wealthy father, who just so happens to be his boss at work.
He sees his new girlfriend as this ultra hot thin bombshell of a woman, and he just cannot wrap his head around why her self esteem is so low. Gwyneth really plays this role to perfection. Most of the screen time we really don't see much of her real appearance, but we know she is overweight in these brief shots of the "real world", but her tone is dead on as a girl who's used to being dumped on.
Now, this movie was panned for reasons I do not entirely agree with. It is true that a beautiful girl like Paltrow indeed carries the look of this film through most of the haul, but what I thought was bold, and inevitable, is that we eventually see her as the fat person she is, and from that we get a very heartfelt performance by Jack Black in a few brief moments where his face does all of the work. Hal starts seeing all of the people he saw "under the spell" as who they really are without his "beer goggles" on, and the revelation that these little children he visited at the hospital for his GF's charity work are actual burn unit survivors comes crashing down on him, when not just a few weeks prior, he had seen them as genetically flawless little tv looking children. The Farelly's really choose the right music at the key scenes (for once), and mixed with Black's depth as a person (yes, it's true), this becomes some very effective drama.
I laughed quite a bit at Shallow Hal, and enjoyed it much more this time around. However, I have a real gripe with the Farelly Bros' sensibilities. They always blow their endings with a happy-go-lucky bow-tie that is really hard to stomach. With There's Something About Mary it was sing-along that drove me nuts, and now with Shallow Hal, it's basically the same type of thing. Just this forced uplifting finale that could have afforded to have been removed. If they had just ended the film on a real note, it would have been a much, much better picture. I literally want to shake them and scream at them for this. They got such great performances, and shook off their contradictory comedy dust with the resolve, only to completely mash it out with a superficial ending. I hate that way of thinking. They don't trust their audience as being intelligent enough to take a lull down into misty eyed territory. They are afraid of tonal shifts that go past an 1/8th of an inch.
SHALLOW HAL (2001)
dir: Peter and Bobby Farelly
dir: Peter and Bobby Farelly
Well, it's another Farelly bros movie, and as usual it has good patches and rough patches. The humor often comes off silly and lightweight, but once in a while, the cast knocks it out of the park. Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow really deliver outstanding performances here, which seems like a small miracle to me, based on the kind of movie this is.
Jack Black plays a surface obsessed jerk who goes after beautiful women who are clearly out of his social league. He wants supermodel hot chicks to date him and his entire life is basically just one rejection after another, but that doesn't stop him. I guess you could call him Tenacious. Get it?
After getting stuck in an elevator with a self help guru (played by Tony Robbins, essentially playing himself), this "shallow Hal" resurfaces into the world seeing only the inner beauty of people, and the results appeal to him as what he craves: supermodel hotness.
He scores with a sweet honey haired blonde (played by Paltrow) and develops a deep relationship, all the while, by mere chance, chatting up her wealthy father, who just so happens to be his boss at work.
He sees his new girlfriend as this ultra hot thin bombshell of a woman, and he just cannot wrap his head around why her self esteem is so low. Gwyneth really plays this role to perfection. Most of the screen time we really don't see much of her real appearance, but we know she is overweight in these brief shots of the "real world", but her tone is dead on as a girl who's used to being dumped on.
Now, this movie was panned for reasons I do not entirely agree with. It is true that a beautiful girl like Paltrow indeed carries the look of this film through most of the haul, but what I thought was bold, and inevitable, is that we eventually see her as the fat person she is, and from that we get a very heartfelt performance by Jack Black in a few brief moments where his face does all of the work. Hal starts seeing all of the people he saw "under the spell" as who they really are without his "beer goggles" on, and the revelation that these little children he visited at the hospital for his GF's charity work are actual burn unit survivors comes crashing down on him, when not just a few weeks prior, he had seen them as genetically flawless little tv looking children. The Farelly's really choose the right music at the key scenes (for once), and mixed with Black's depth as a person (yes, it's true), this becomes some very effective drama.
I laughed quite a bit at Shallow Hal, and enjoyed it much more this time around. However, I have a real gripe with the Farelly Bros' sensibilities. They always blow their endings with a happy-go-lucky bow-tie that is really hard to stomach. With There's Something About Mary it was sing-along that drove me nuts, and now with Shallow Hal, it's basically the same type of thing. Just this forced uplifting finale that could have afforded to have been removed. If they had just ended the film on a real note, it would have been a much, much better picture. I literally want to shake them and scream at them for this. They got such great performances, and shook off their contradictory comedy dust with the resolve, only to completely mash it out with a superficial ending. I hate that way of thinking. They don't trust their audience as being intelligent enough to take a lull down into misty eyed territory. They are afraid of tonal shifts that go past an 1/8th of an inch.