Directed by: Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly
Starring: Jack Black, Jason Alexander, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tony Robbins, Brooke Burns, Joe Viterelli
Shallow Hal is a pointed satire on how we view external beauty vs. internal beauty and how society prizes external over the internal when the chips are down. If a friend or relative asks if the person you are seeing is attractive, this is a question fraught with peril for you. If you say yes and the friend or relative meets your mate and disagrees with you, you get the stink eye or a disappointed head shake. If you say the person has a great personality, then you are admitting your mate isn't so hot. The question that should be asked is, "Do you have a good time with that person?" or "Does he/she make you happy?"
The Farrelly Brothers' Shallow Hal knows all about such things. It puts the saying "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder" to the extreme test. We first meet Hal (Black) as a young man who is told by his father on his deathbed only to date hot women. Hal's adult life is a never-ending series of dates with hot women...and no commitment. Why commit to one woman when there is perhaps a hotter one right around the corner? Hal's best friend Mauricio (Alexander) feels pretty much the same way, so much so that he declines going to a Beatles reunion concert with a hot girl because she has a second toe slightly longer than the big one. One day, though, Hal is trapped in an elevator with famed motivational guru Tony Robbins (playing himself) and tells his story. Tony is baffled by Hal's shallowness and puts a spell on him which will allow him to see the inner beauty in everyone, as he puts it. What Tony actually did was make not-so-attractive women look like supermodels to Hal. He meets Rosemary (Paltrow), who is sweet, kind, loving, and weighs about three bills but to Hal looks like the Gwyneth Paltrow we all know. She would be a perfect mate for Hal if she didn't weigh three hundred pounds. Mauricio is stunned to see his friend hooking up with Rosemary and various other, ahem, less attractive females. ("Don't you think you should raise the bar a little bit?")
Shallow Hal is able to negotiate the fine line between insightful comedy and poor taste as they do in their best movies. The joke is how Hal and Mauricio, no prizes themselves, can be so judgmental in their opinions of women. But, Tony's hypnosis also works cleverly the other way, in which women who look like models but are horrible people are seen as ugly by Hal. Hal falls for Rosemary, who thinks (and rightfully so) that Jack's compliments are somehow jokes or ironic putdowns, without knowing that Hal isn't seeing the 300-pound Rosemary, but the slender blonde. She is so used to people judging her that she hasn't learn to accept a compliment without strings. Most of the time, though, we see the slender Paltrow and not the one in the fat suit, because this is how Hal sees her through his rose-colored eyes.
As night follows day, we know Hal's spell will be lifted and he will be faced with the reality of Rosemary. The final act shows us how Hal truly feels about her, and how beautiful she is even though she may not be society's version of a pretty woman. ("I saw a beautiful woman. I didn't care what anyone else saw") Shallow Hal soon becomes a standard romantic comedy in which Hal decides he loves Rosemary no matter what and chases her down just as she is about to leave the country with the Peace Corps. The movie, despite its subject, has a heart and is enriched by smart comic performances. And it actually has something to say about how people view attractiveness, and how heartless they can be doing so.
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