Shallow Hal
With Jason Alexander, Jack Black, Gwyneth Paltrow
At major cinemas
REVIEW BY DALE MILLS
So much bilge pours out of Hollywood that it is surprising to find something half-decent at all. This film is one of the half-decent ones. Don't be put off from reading further by the words "light romantic comedy", there is no other way to describe this film. It is the sub-text makes it worthwhile.
Mauricio (played by Jason Alexander) and Hal (Jack Black) are two "regular" guys in their late 30s and losing their hair. They want nothing more than to settle down with a "good woman" — as long as she is young, has a "perfect" body, a good sexual technique, is infinitely doting and is also "cultured and all that shit".
Then Hal gets stuck in a lift with a self-help guru, who puts him in a trance. Hal now is only attracted to women if they are "beautiful on the inside".
Hal meets Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow). Rosemary sees herself as ugly. She works as a volunteer in a children's hospital. Hal sees her as slim, blonde and attractive. They fall in love.
But eventually Hal must break out of his trance. When he does, will he stay with Rosemary, or dump her?
The gift of the film is that it challenges the "body fascism" imposed on us by whole industries built on commercialised concepts of beauty. Everyone must be toned, white, blonde and able-bodied to be attractive. Those falling outside the artificially manipulated "beauty" concepts are losers.
Shallow Hal confronts these challenges with such witty sophistication and lightness of touch that I had to remind myself that this was a Hollywood movie.
A sterner critic could easily find faults with this production. It is cliched, schmaltzy and dripping in lashings of emotive treacle. The two main male characters are loathsome and feminist readings could find much in the film that is simply reactionary.
But the surprise of the movie is not that it could have been done better, or that the characters could have been more sympathetic, but that Hollywood has made a movie which can at the same time be critical of the beauty myth and a good laugh. The sentimentalists among us may also need some tissues at the end.
From Green Left Weekly, February 27, 2002.
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