TNMC: Untitled Deadpool Column

Shallow Beginnings

Today, we begin another brave adventure into the world of movie screenwriting. To begin this journey into the soul of filmaking we have a review of Shallow Hal by The Farrelly Brothers. An old friend, Lester Livermore, does the duty of dissecting the comedy for us. Be sure to follow the expedition by joining us tomorrow for a script review of Glitters.

Shallow Hal script review

"Good evening ladies and germs. Lester Livermore here. The boss man has been assigning me all these serious scripts to review for some time now. This time I get a chance to stretch my comedic wings (and boy are they tired) on the Farrelly brothers script for Shallow Hal. If you've read my earlier reviews you might think I'm a pretty dry guy only interested in deep dramas. I think not. The Farrelly brothers are amongst my favorite filmmakers. These guys get away with shit that nobody else even attempts anymore. When I purchased my first DVD player I made Dumb & Dumber one of my first acquisitions.

If you've watched all their movies you'd know that the brothers have a real soft spot for the abnormal. They adore losers and those who just don't fit in with the rest of society. Dumb & Dumber was about a couple of morons. Kingpin followed a disgraced bowler and an Amish man. There's Something About Mary was about a woman who attracted all the losers. Me, Myself & Irene was about a cop with a split personality. You get the idea. Appearing in these movies are an albino, a dwarf, cripples, the mentally retarded, general idiots and various rejects. Most people would be afraid to use these people for fear of being attacked for making fun of them. The Farrelly brothers however charge unafraid into this quandary by not making fun of them. They take the outcasts and make them full characters in their movies. I bring this all up because Shallow Hal indulges this tendency to the fullest.

We first meet Hal (eventually played by Jack Black) as a young boy. His father is in the hospital, dying. Young Hal is brought in to say goodbye to his dear old dad, who by the way is "pretty jacked up" on drugs. Delirious he tries to give his son some important rules to live by. For instance, "Don't be satisfied with routine pussy. Go for the best!" His father passes on leaving Hal with some rather shallow ideas of what constitutes the perfect mate. We flash forward to meet Hal again as a forty year old man, chasing young sorority girls and starting to get a little depressed with his failure to find happiness in life.

He goes to see a psychic for advice (this part appears to have been changed from what can be seen in the trailer) and gets hypnotized. The psychic then tricks Hal into seeing a person's inner beauty as their outer beauty. So now fat and unattractive women that Hal would normally have ignored suddenly look like beauty queens to him. He starts a dating rampage where he picks up the most physically unattractive women known to man, including one described in the script as "a pretty Turkish guard." Eventually he stumbles on an enormous woman named Kimberly and falls madly in love. We, the audience, only get blurred or incomplete shots of the fat Kimberly. When we see her clearly we see her as Hal sees her, the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow.

This script is a riot, causing me to frequently burst out laughing. It's rude, crude and completely lacking in taste. It does, however, have a genuine sweetness that prevents the crude humor from becoming mean spirited. The story has a moral and that is that physical beauty is not the complete picture of a person. Hal, who has spent most of his life in the shallow pursuit of physical perfection in a woman, suddenly finds himself able to appreciate their inner beauty, their personality, without concern for the package it's wrapped in. In a time when the media has become obsessed with thin to the point where we have to endure skeletal women prancing about our TVs, the script was a refreshing blast of fresh air. Frankly some of the most entertaining and intriguing people I've ever known were well overweight so I enjoyed a script willing to take society to task for its shallow pursuit of image over substance.

If the story has a weak point it's that at its core it's the standard romance formula. Meet cute, fall in love, break up over a misunderstanding, get back together, the end. It is only a minor problem though. There is so much stuff, both funny and well intentioned, hanging off that old chestnut of a story that I found it easy to ignore the predictable formula. Better stuff is going on that keeps you distracted from the tired formula. For instance, whenever Hal starts hitting on a woman after he's been hypnotized, he uses his favored cheesy pick up lines. Intended to be used on gorgeous women, they don't have quite the intended effect on the women he now finds himself attracted to. Here he meets the 300 pound Kimberly in a department store.

Hal: It looked so funny seeing someone like you holding up a pair of old lady trou.

Kimberly: Someone like me?

Hal: You know, someone so fit.

Kimberly: You're a fucking dork.

If the Farrelly brothers can film this script with the same touch they showed on There's Something About Mary then they will have a hysterical and intelligent movie on their hands. Considering their generally solid track record and talented cast, I have little doubt they'll succeed."

(Review submitted by Lester Livermore.)

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Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)
Questions, comments, praises etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org

Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in such major websites as Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt Magazine. Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.