Maybe the acclaim for "Y Tu Mamá También" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" will prompt a reappraisal of Alfonso Cuarón's "Great Expectations," which was greeted as a travesty when it opened in 1997. (In a Premiere magazine profile at the time, Paltrow suggested that Cuarón had lost control of the production.) It's a rapturous updating of the Dickens novel that has its dedicated admirers; the discerning British film critic Robin Wood has called it a model for how film adaptations can be true to the spirit of their sources while being wholly original creations. Paltrow plays Estella, the young beauty raised by her guardian Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on the male sex. Ethan Hawke is the young artist whose bloodstream Estella enters when they are just children. It's a tough role, that of a beauty whose surface radiance has no inner correspondence. As the critic Steve Vineberg put it at the time, Paltrow has to play "the sadness of a woman with no emotions," and she's remarkable. The infernally beautiful young Jean Simmons was memorable as the younger Estella in David Lean's famous 1946 film of the novel. (Valerie Hobson, who played the grown Estella, is memorable too, but for all the wrong reasons -- she's a colossal comedown after Simmons.) Put it this way, Simmons is as good as Paltrow, but she isn't any better.

It was another literary adaptation, Neil LaBute's 2002 film of A.S. Byatt's "Possession," that provided Paltrow with one of her best roles. Like "Great Expectations," "Possession" was held up as an example of how movies are hopelessly inadequate for conveying the complexity and richness of novels. In some ways, LaBute seems to understand the material better than Byatt did. He made a fleet, sharp adaptation that focused on the parallel love stories Byatt had devised. LaBute's film is a civilized entertainment entirely free of the reverence and stuffiness that clogs up too many period films. As the female, British half of a pair of academics chasing down the hidden love affair between two Victorian poets, Paltrow put both her coolness and the propriety of her self-presentation to comic, and at times melancholic, effect. What's touching about the performance is the reticence that remains in Paltrow as her icy exterior starts to melt. It's her most stylized, and stylish, performance.

Paltrow's fine-boned beauty makes her appear almost a stylized creature at times, more a moonbeam than a sunbeam. And that may be why she has often been at her most affecting in comedies or love stories, which are stylized forms. François Truffaut once wrote about how, because of the surrounding idealized perfection, sad moments in musicals can be especially wounding.

That's the principle at work in the Farrelly brothers' "Shallow Hal," which features Paltrow's most affecting performance -- certainly her sunniest and most relaxed. The movie's message is childishly simple -- beauty is only skin deep. But conviction and emotion can make even the most banal concepts feel rich, and "Shallow Hal" is one of the loveliest, most affecting, and most emotionally satisfying of American film comedies. Paltrow plays Rosemary, a girl whose obesity keeps people from seeing what a beautiful person she is -- except for Jack Black's Hal, who is under a spell that lets him see only a person's inner beauty. So Hal sees Rosemary as a slim, beautiful girl; the "real" Rosemary is Paltrow in a fat suit.

"Shallow Hal" provoked exactly the kind of outrage you'd expect. In Slate, David Edelstein said of Paltrow's performance and her detractors, "she takes many more chances here, and she won't get an Oscar -- just grief from liberals and organizations that claim to speak for the overweight." Some women claimed that the movie was saying it was OK to love a fat girl as long as she was really Gwyneth Paltrow. The trouble is that nothing in the movie supports that reading. In the Farrellys' conception, inner beauty cuts both ways. The real proof of what the movie is saying comes when Jack's spell is lifted. From then on, the only Rosemary anyone sees is Rosemary as she actually appears, and that's the woman Jack has to learn to love -- not the svelte blond beauty his spell allowed him to see. That girl is, quite literally, a fantasy creature.

As Rosemary, Paltrow expresses emotion that has the force of the elemental. The hurt on her face when Jack, under his spell, chides her, saying that she must have to fend off the guys, is exceeded only by the hurt she expresses when she realizes he has (momentarily, in the movie's scheme) rejected her because of who she really is. Paltrow lets us see a young woman learning to be comfortable with who she really is and then, cruelly, made to feel a freak inside her body. There's no distance between what Rosemary feels and what Paltrow makes us feel.

"Shallow Hal" and last year's underrated "Stuck on You" reveal that the Farrelly brothers may be less interested in sophomoric humor than in recasting themselves as the radical humanists of American film comedy. These are deeply inclusionary movies, in which ugliness as well as beauty are only skin deep. In "Shallow Hal," Paltrow is right on their wavelength. The directors had a comically irresistible idea -- to take the golden princess of American movies and put her in a fat suit. The movie erases the distance between Paltrow and the audience, not because she is pulled off her pedestal and humiliated, but because it allows us to see her wounded by emotions that most of us assume would be alien to Gwyneth Paltrow. That's another example of how the Farrellys make hash of our assumptions. Of course "Shallow Hal" is red meat to Paltrow haters, because it says judgments based on surfaces arebthe ugliest thing imaginable. A simple idea her most fervent detractors have yet to grasp.

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