dir. Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
It is difficult to even discuss Shallow Hal without feeling queasy. The premise is bad enough. Hal (Jack Black) is hypnotised to see only people’s inner beauty, meaning he sees the overweight Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) as a conventionally attractive, slim woman. Cue a plethora of pathetic fat jokes (made especially obscene by the fact that Rosemary’s true physical form isn’t even particularly fat). They’re not original; a chair that she’s sitting on breaks, more than once. But Shallow Hal manages to go much further than this. It is deeply misogynistic at its core, but also indulges in occasional racism, ableism and transphobia. The film’s attempted ruminations on shallowness and inner beauty are totally undermined when the protagonist is one of the most selfish, cruel, horrible people ever written and still purported to be the good guy. Bonuses: Jason Alexander has a gross little stubby tail, for some reason, and Rosemary’s father speaks in one of the worst Irish accents ever committed to film, for some reason. The Farrelly brothers have a truly mutated concept of what is and isn’t funny, but with Shallow Hal they were clearly attempting something with a shred of depth to it. They failed.
BMDb 