Shallow Hal

what the film does

hal larson (black) is a shallow man who chases supermodels and is rejected by all of them. his father, dying on a hospital bed while high on painkillers, told him to never settle. hal took the advice literally. he works at a financial firm, lusts after his neighbor, and goes clubbing with his friend mauricio (jason alexander), who is equally shallow.

hal gets stuck in an elevator with tony robbins (playing himself). robbins, annoyed by hal’s shallowness, hypnotizes him. from that moment, hal sees people’s inner beauty as physical beauty. he meets rosemary (paltrow), the daughter of his boss. she is morbidly obese. hal sees her as a slender, beautiful woman. he falls in love. the film follows the predictable arc: hal and rosemary date, he is confused by the reactions of everyone around him, mauricio discovers the hypnosis, the spell is broken, and hal must decide whether the love he felt was real.

the cinematographer was russell carpenter, who shot titanic four years earlier. the score is by william goodrum. the band ivy contributed music. the film was shot in charlotte, north carolina, and at wachusett mountain in massachusetts.

why this one

three reasons. first, the farrelly brothers. peter and bobby farrelly are the most interesting comedy directors of the late 90s and early 2000s because their films are structurally compassionate. they cast people with disabilities, they write characters who are mocked by other characters but not by the film, and they use gross-out comedy to lower your defenses before delivering an emotional payload. shallow hal is their most explicit attempt at this structure: the jokes are about appearance, but the film’s argument is that appearance is the least interesting thing about a person.

second, jack black. this is the film where he proved he could carry a romantic lead. he is funny, but the performance works because he plays hal’s sincerity without irony. hal is not pretending to love rosemary. he loves her. the audience knows he has been hypnotized, and hal does not, and the film trusts that dramatic irony to do the work.

third, the controversy. paltrow wore a 25-pound fat suit for the scenes where the audience sees rosemary as she really is. she later said she regretted making the film. the fat acceptance movement criticized the premise. the film was called both body-positive and fatphobic, often by people who had not seen it. the debate is more interesting than the film itself, and it has not been resolved: can a comedy about a man who learns to look past appearance succeed if the film itself uses a fat suit for laughs?

the film grossed $141 million on a $40 million budget. roger ebert gave it three stars and wrote that “the movie is more complex and thoughtful than the advertising campaign suggests.”

what stays with me

the scene where the spell breaks and hal sees rosemary for the first time. the film does not cut. it holds on his face, and you watch the exact moment where his love and his confusion collide. black plays it without comedy. it is the scene that makes the film work, and it is the scene that the critics who dismissed the film probably missed.

on hand

the dvd is the 20th century fox home entertainment release in the canon.