With their stunning bad taste and cheerfully offensive excursions into racial and sexual comedy, the Farrelly brothers have given much amusement, and in the process become Hollywood’s licensed jesters in their own carefully delineated field of non-PC entertainment. Me, Myself & Irene, starring Jim Carrey, is their new venture. Broader than broad, it is written, produced and directed by Peter and Bobby, with credits for Mike Cerrone and Bradley Thomas on script and production.
And they give us everything we hope and expect of them – plus a bit more. Frantic masturbation scene involving a sweet young woman? Check. Pointlessly violent assault on a defenceless animal? Check. Jokes involving racial and minority groups? Check. But there’s one group in particular to be offended – retards! (I am quoting the exquisitely provocative formulation used by Matt Dillon in There’s Something About Mary.) Peter and Bobby raise the issue of those who are, as they say, mentally challenged and appear to add a raucous challenge of their own.
The brothers get away with most of these flourishes on account of their sheer insouciant conviction and comic brio, plus the unspoken understanding that the jibes are a slap at white liberal condescension. But it isn’t obvious that the gags about crazy people quite come off – of which more in a moment. Jim Carrey gives us his usual body-popping, face-squeezing, crowd-pleasing masterclass in physical comedy. With his open, innocent expression, buzz cut and air of perpetual perplexity, he looks like no one so much as Dick York in the 60s TV show Bewitched.
He plays Charlie Baileygates, an all-American white-bread regular guy and Rhode Island state trooper whose life is shattered when his bride falls in love with the, ahem, vertically challenged African-American limo driver who ferries them home from the church. She runs off, leaving Charlie with three black triplets, and Charlie is in denial about his feelings, until they boil over 15 years later in the form of a bizarre split personality. Or, as this film insists on putting it, schizophrenia. Thereafter Charlie’s Jekyll and Hyde personalities both fall in love with a young woman called Irene (Renée Zellweger), who is on the run from corrupt federal officials led by the sinister Lt Gerke (a reliably excellent Chris Cooper).
There is a scene at the very beginning of this film in which the Farrellys’ horrible genius is deployed to its fullest. On his wedding day, poor, inoffensive Charlie inadvertently offends his small black driver, who erupts with rage and ends up attacking him with what look like martial-arts nunchakas. Naturally, only a real nincompoop could object to this scene; in its sheer excessive outrageousness, it is brilliant, but it also functions unmistakably as a little pre-emptive strike at any uptight bores who are thinking of whining about offensiveness. Here is a funny black midget, it is saying, and here is a joke about someone accidentally offending him. OK?
Then there is the uproarious scene in which Charlie and Irene find a dead cow in the road; trying to carry it out of the way, Charlie discovers it is actually still alive but in agony. So he tries to kill it, first by emptying his pistol into its head and then by strangling it, while the persistent beast moos merrily away. It’s inspired in its own delirious way, and let down only by the fact that it is obviously some sort of animatronic cow.
The inevitable self-pleasuring scene comes when Irene enters Charlie’s hotel room, dismayed to find him with an official police photo of her, surrounded by sticky crumpled tissues and an absurdly large dispenser of hand-cream. This hardly has the inventiveness of the legendary Cameron-Diaz-hair-gel sequence from There’s Something About Mary, which was actually a comment of tactless inspiration on the way modern media encourage male consumers literally and figuratively to jerk off over female images like the miraculously beautiful Diaz. But it does have that bull-in-a-china-shop aptness, an acknowledgement of the open secret of adult male masturbation rarely found in any other film of any genre.
But now we come back to the “schizophrenia” issue, which has had mental health charities up in arms. The split-personality device gives Carrey an opportunity for his usual bravura dual-character playing, in the tradition of the Nutty Professors of Jerry Lewis and Eddie Murphy, and Steve Martin in All of Me. His condition is repeatedly described as “advanced involuntary schizophrenia”. Do the Farrelly boys realise that “schizophrenia” is an ignorant solecism here? Worryingly, the answer isn’t clear.
The classic definition of a gentleman is someone who never gives offence accidentally. Something similar applies to the Farrellys’ brand of non-PC mischief if it is to be successful. But here it looks oddly as if the brothers have simply blundered. Here their sophistication, and their attack radar for mealy-mouthed liberal sensibilities, have gone a bit wrong.
The gag rate of Me, Myself & Irene falls off exponentially in the last half of the picture, and there’s a bit of straining to make the plot ends tie up. There’s a lot of crazy energy and debonair disregard for the rules of liberal good taste; but when the laughs fall away and the comedy-nous falters, these things get very wearing indeed.
Me, Myself and Irene (2000)
Directed by: Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
Starring: Jim Carrey, Renée Zellweger, Anthony Anderson, Mongo Brownlee, Jerod Mixon, Chris Cooper, Richard Jenkins, Robert Forster, Mike Cerrone, Daniel Greene
Screenplay by: Peter Farrelly, Mike Cerrone
Production Design by: Sydney J. Bartholomew Jr.
Cinematography by: Mark Irwin
Film Editing by: Christopher Greenbury
Costume Design by: Pamela Withers
Set Decoration by: Scott Jacobson
Music by: Lee Scott, Pete Yorn
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, crude humor, strong language and some violence.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Relaase Date: June 23, 2000
Visits: 203
