The Problematics: ‘Shallow Hal’ Isn’t Even Skin Deep

Does time fly, or has the 21st century accelerated consciousness-raising in popular culture? Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Shallow Hal turns 20 today. Which means, if it were a person, it would be close to completing its bachelor’s degree, if it were a person attending college. What I’m trying to say is that it’s reached a certain maturity. Which is to say it’s ripe. Not in a good way.

The Farrelly brothers spent about half of the 1990s making what we used to call “envelope-pushing” comedies. Their pictures made light of male sexual/romantic insecurity in extremis, but also of mental illness, possible mental defectiveness, incest, dismemberment — all things you aren’t supposed to joke about. (Okay, they only produced the one with the incest theme, 2001’s Say It Isn’t So.) They also packed their pictures with dialogue teeming with profanity and gross metaphors, and bathroom humor sight gags and gag-me depictions of sex with (figurative) gargoyles.

Shallow Hal was a twist on There’s Something About Mary‘s theme of infatuation with the supposedly unobtainable — it compels its title character to pursue the ostensibly undesirable. 

These days the funniest thing about Shallow Hal is reading online descriptions of its premise and storyline, which almost invariably begin “It tells the story of a shallow man, Hal…” Wait — the main character is “shallow?” How can you tell? Oh wait again, it’s right there in the title! Later in some of these recaps, the writers note that motivational speaking superstar (and absolutely gigantic human being; the scene in which he appears mentions he wears a size 16 shoe) Tony Robbins appears as himself in the movie. And that when he’s stuck in an elevator with Jack Black’s Hal, he is struck by that character’s…you’ll never guess…shallowness! I don’t know, people, but I’m beginning to think that the movie Shallow Hal is about a guy…named Hal…who is shallow! (On the other hand Robbins himself uses the word “shallow” in this scene rather a lot.)

It’s true — Jack Black’s salaryman Hal only dates, or tries to date, women he rates as “tens.” His Brillo-haired buddy Mauricio, a thankless role taken on by poor Jason Alexander, is similarly inclined, contemplating dumping his current knockout girlfriend because her second toe is longer than her big toe. 

So. Robbins hypnotizes Hal into seeing only the inner beauty in the women he meets. And Hal falls hard for the overweight Rosemary, played by Gwyneth Paltrow in and out of a fat suit.

Now, the “fat is funny” trope has been around longer than cinema; but it’s the movies that codified it for us 20th and 21st century dwellers. And they created a largely permanent record of it. In silent film, the team of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (note the clever nickname) and Buster Keaton played up the physical contrast between the rotund and rail-like comedians, and Arbuckle had a physical dexterity that viewers didn’t associate with performers of his double-plus size. The fact that both men were comic geniuses made the team-up something more than superficially amusing. Similarly, the silent and sound movies featuring Laurel and Hardy are still not just watchable but delightful, because Oliver Hardy’s generous proportions aren’t the central part of the joke.

While Paltrow is a good comedic actor, all the gags centered on the Rosemary character have only to do with the fact that she’s fat and Hal can’t see it. As when Rosemary orders a double pizzaburger and chili fries with cheese, and Hal marvels that she’s so not diet-obsessed! Or the pool scene, in which Rosemary cannonballs and propels a child into a tree. Or the sex scene with the giant underwear. Each one more agonizing than the last. The script sets up multiple set pieces featuring plausibility issues that aren’t vaguely worth solving and teases a nearly two-hour movie out of them.

There’s also the way that Farrellys stack the deck. In the world of Shallow Hal, every person who’s not conventionally attractive has inner beauty. While contemporary disability activists rightly complain about movie villains with facial or other deformities being a kind of norm, it’s also true that in the wide wide world, a person’s appearance doesn’t automatically connote the kind of duality presented by this movie. 

In its overall argumentation, the movie tries to have its comedic cake and eat it, too. It’s not enough that a trio of women with whom Hal dances include one who’s plus-size, another with unkempt eyebrows, and another with a prominent proboscis. These features are overplayed by the makeup department so the trio looks like it stepped out of a house of horrors in an old Universal picture. The point is to make them look grotesque, not different in an everyday way.

This tendency culminates with a truly gross and monumentally offensive gag in which a sleek female restaurant maître d’ is revealed as a not-particularly-well-put-together trans woman when Hal is restored to shallowness. Here the movie ignorantly insults several birds with one stone. 

Similarly, the Farrellys overdo the “inner beauty” business. Paltrow’s Rosemary, excessive eating habits notwithstanding, is blatantly too perfect. She’s friendly, she’s open, she loves animals, she’s joining the Peace Corps.

“Everything we know about beauty is programmed” by advertising, television, and, to hear self-described classical liberals tell it, ancient art. Current trends in advertising, showing individuals with diverse appearances modeling clothes and jewelry and selling self-care products, are an attempt to redress the balance. But given that they’re still subjects in advertising — selling things — there’s an, um, shallowness inherent in this trend. 

So in popular culture the weight issue remains paradoxical. There’s a substantial lobby that argues for ecumenical body acceptance, to the extent that celebrities including singer Adele and actress Rebel Wilson are subject to social media disapprobation for losing weight. As someone who once managed to reach the border of 300 pounds while mainly on a liquid diet (the liquid being boilermakers of Knob Creek bourbon and Stella Artois), I can attest that 300, for me, is uncomfortable both physically and existentially. And I still yo-yo; after my mother died, I went on a comfort-eating binge, and my physician asked me, dryly, whether I was keen on joining her soon. I’m big enough now that someone might ask me to be a Santa, and I have tended to jolliness, and I make jokes sometimes.

When looking at the comedies in which Rebel Wilson starred prior to her weight loss, we see a distinct brash persona. But certain manifestations of that were a little eyebrow-raising at least — her role in 2016’s How To Be Single, for instance, as an often insanely drunk carouser falling all over the place. How much did her appearance play into the ostensible humor of her pratfalls?

But damn, this column isn’t here to solve the world’s problems. Still. It’s worth pondering.

Are the Farrellys to be commended for casting an actor who actually has spina bifida to play an amiable supporting role in this movie? They sure are. Do they whiff their intentions in the treatment and depiction of a young burn victim in the place where Rosemary works? They sure do. Is the only funny line in this movie, for completely different reasons than it was funny 20 years ago, “Not a Clapton fan?” Yes it is. Were one to take it wholly on its face, one could conclude that Shallow Hal is something worse than a “problematic:” that is a spectacle devoid of any genuine feeling or perspective, a rote checking or right and wrong boxes that doesn’t even pretend to believe its own lessons. The Farrelly Brothers’ worst film. And I’ve seen Osmosis Jones.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream Shallow Hal