"Shallow Hal"

The very naughty brothers Farrelly take on the weighty subject of inner beauty and come up with their sweetest -- and best -- movie yet.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 9, 2001 | "Shallow Hal" opens with a dying man's advice to his young son, and they're words to live by: "Don't be satisfied with routine poontang." If part of what people love the Farrelly brothers for is their audacious crudeness -- it's actually an extraordinarily refined brand of crudeness -- that line certainly promises a wild ride. What it doesn't foreshadow is the pure sweetness of "Shallow Hal," a sweetness that sticks with you past the last frame without ever being cloying. "Shallow Hal" isn't the funniest Farrelly brothers movie, but it's the one that draws their knockabout humanist qualities into the tightest circle. Humor that's deemed inappropriate is often the most necessary kind.

Hal (Jack Black) is a pudgy, not overly good-looking guy who, after taking the advice of his dying dad, nevertheless thinks he's entitled to the most gorgeous babes. He and his pal Mauricio (Jason Alexander) spend most of their time comparing notes on which women are most perfectly suited to enter their dazzling orbit. They succeed with virtually none of them, of course, and can't accept what they have on the rare occasions when they do. (Mauricio rejects his knockout of a girlfriend because her second toe is longer than her big one -- this from a man who tries to disguise his baldness with what looks like a yarmulke of iron shavings.)

But then Hal happens to meet personal-transformation guru Anthony Robbins (played, with booming charm, by himself) and winds up receiving an impromptu "hypnosis" session. After that, Hal sees women differently. Those with the proverbial "inner beauty" are transformed into babes. Plain or average-looking women who work with the blind or rehabilitate drug-addicted orangutans (OK, I made that last one up, but you get the idea) take on the aura of supermodels. When Hal catches sight of Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow), a sometime Peace Corps volunteer who also spends much of her time helping out in the children's ward of the local hospital, he falls for her instantly.

To him (and to us) she looks like, well, Gwyneth Paltrow, in her usual svelte frame. To the rest of the world, she's an immensely overweight woman whose clothes don't fit her right and who walks with the awkward carriage of someone who just feels wrong in her body. But in the cruel shorthand used to describe less-than-pretty girls throughout the history of time, she has a great personality -- it's little wonder Hal falls for her. Hal's new gift of sight works in reverse, too: Now, when he looks at a hot gold digger, he sees a wrinkled hag.

The Farrellys weave their jokes nimbly around the movie's gentle message. "Shallow Hal" isn't out to teach us a lesson -- and if it is, we're in deep trouble, because the idea that beauty is only skin deep is something most of us should have learned long ago. But this is the most overtly sweet-tempered of all the Farrellys' movies, the fullest flowering of every good impulse they've ever had. It's something of a triumph for them, too, in that it's structured better than any of their previous pictures. Its pacing gets a little stringy in the last third, but it doesn't have the wayward waviness of, say, "Me, Myself and Irene" -- a movie that, amusing as it is, makes you work hard to follow its lackadaisical bread-crumb trail.

Some moviegoers may walk away from "Shallow Hal" disappointed that there aren't more outlandishly filthy gags. (There are none involving makeshift hair goo, although there is a pretty good conjunctivitis joke.) But the Farrellys (who also cowrote the script, with Sean Moynihan) are getting even better at knowing how to use the camera to get laughs: In one of the movie's best sight gags, we see Hal and Rosemary canoeing on a pond. Even though we're seeing the "thin" Rosemary, the one Hal sees, her end of the canoe is slung low in the water, while Jack, at the back end, is hiked high in the air. The Farrellys also know how to use casting to get a giggle out of us, by using veteran character actor Joe Viterelli (who, with a face like a map of the rugged Italian countryside, usually plays mob thugs) as Rosemary's winkling, twinkling Irish pappy.

Next Page: Paltrow's physical approach to her character is wonderful

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