Shallow Hal

The Farrelly brothers are pretty much responsible for mainstreaming gross-out comedy. Shallow Hal is a comedy but one which actively tries to be heartfelt.

Jack Black is shallow Hal, an overweight loser forever trying to get a hot girlfriend, oblivious to his own physical shortcomings, Such is the nature of our society. When Hal is magically reprogrammed by real-life self-help guru Anthony Robbins he acquires the ability to see women’s inner beauty.

The essential premise “look inside” is a good one but it’s too glibly carried off to have much sticking power. The problem is that the Farrelly’s way of representing Hal’s gift is by making physically unattractive women into hotties. Thus when Hal falls for the boss’s grossly overweight daughter, Rosemary, she is imaged in Jack’s eyes by Gwyneth Paltrow. Which, of course, defeats the purpose of he rasnformation. The Farrellys do get Hal to see the real Rosemary by the film's end and pair him off with her but it’s hardly convincing. The Farrelly’s also seem to not to see the irony in the fact that making visual  jokes about Rosemary’s overweightness actually undermines their alleged message. The very uneven treatment to Hal’s revisioning of the world is also unsettling. Some characters he sees transformed, others such his balding mate, Maurizio (Jason Alexander) remain unaffected. 

Nevertheless thanks. to the Black-Paltrow combination there is some charm to the film, much more so than the 2000 Mel Gibson male-makeover movie What Women Want, but like it, despite the merit of its core message it is too superficial to carry any weight.

 

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