Identity check

There's something missing about Irene

by Peter Keough

ME, MYSELF & IRENE, Directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly. Written by Peter and Bobby Farrelly and Mike Cerrone. With Jim Carrey, Renée Zellweger, Robert Forster, Chris Cooper, Anthony Anderson, Mongo Brownlee, Jerod Mixon, Michael Bowman, and Tony Cox. A Twentieth Century Fox release. At the Copley Place, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

Even though it might be the least funny Farrelly brothers film yet, Me, Myself & Irene still has more laughs than any other movie this summer, with the possible exception of Battlefield Earth. But those looking for the equal of such gross-out moments as the prolonged bowel movement in Dumb and Dumber, the hair gel in There's Something About Mary, or just about any gag in their underrated masterpiece Kingpin will be disappointed, though there's a good chance "a little extra cheese on your taco" will enter the pop-cultural lexicon. As a chapter in the Farrellys' ongoing road tour of the frontiers between sado-masochism and true love, scatology and sentimentality, Irene is just a diverting sidetrip.

Farrellys with taste NEW YORK -- Are there limits to bad taste, even in a Farrelly brothers movie? In one scene in Me, Myself & Irene, Hank, the id-like half of Jim Carrey's character, actually apologizes: to the albino Whitey (Michael Bowman) for calling him a giant Q-tip. In fact, Peter and Bobby Farrelly submit their films to far more audience testing than the average studio release gets, and they're sensitive to the fine line between outrageous humor and mean-spirited cruelty. "We're huge believers in test meetings, and so we do five, six, seven of our own tests before we do the studio tests," says Peter Farrelly. "We go to colleges. We live in the Boston area. And they tell us how far we go. There was a scene at the very end of the movie after Charlie pulls the bandage off his chin and the sons say, `Look dad, you know, now you could blow your nose and wipe your butt at the same time.' And they laugh and he says, `Ha, ha, ha, ha . . . yeah, well, your mother fucked a midget.' And the audience laughed, but afterward they said, `You know, you should cut that thing. That was mean.' And also, as Bob pointed out afterward, what about the midget sitting in the audience watching this movie? It just seems like it crossed the line for us; it was mean-spirited, so we cut it." "We approach a movie," adds Bobby Farrelly, "by asking ourselves every 10 minutes, what does the audience expect in the next 10 minutes? Then we try to not give them that but to not disappoint, that's the key. You know, you can refuse to give them something and piss them off, but you have to satisfy them as the movie goes on. It does become more and more expected for us to have a certain style of humor. But we're going to veer off. We're not going to keep doing this. It's not going to be the same tone. I don't want a Something About Mary 3, you know." "We're not gonna run up and do Interiors, though," notes Peter. "I think it's like Jim [Carrey] going from doing a big comedy to doing something more dramatic, he's going to lose a little of his audience because everybody wants to see him doing the comedies. It would probably be like that for us. So we don't see ourselves doing that right now." In fact, their next project is called Shallow Hal. "He's so shallow," says Bobby, "he looks at girls only for their . . . he'll only consider girls based on their beauty. He goes to a hypnotist who teaches him to see inner beauty and so he falls for this girl who, by all accounts, is not what one would consider beautiful but he sees her as the most beautiful woman who ever lived. He sees her as Gwyneth Paltrow; that's where she comes into the story. Now everyone else is looking at a girl who like, weighs 400 pounds or, you know, is very unattractive. But in his eyes, she's the most gorgeous woman who ever lived. So he falls for her and he learns to see people on a different level. It's a bit of a fairy tale; it's a really nice, nice movie with a lot of heart." "That, to us, is the hardest part," says Peter. "Creating a story that has a lot of heart and yet it's not so obvious that you're like, `Oh, yeah, I'm going to buy that . . . ' I guess our sensibility is different from the average person's but the main thing we're trying to do, when we start a new story, is to create a character that you can like enough so that we can hang the gags on it. The jokes, for us, are the easy part. We do those just for fun, just to lighten the mood, but it's really the character that challenges you to create."

Then there's the Jim Carrey factor. Unfairly rebuffed by the Oscars (and the box office) for his dramatic ambitions in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, he returns to his staple, extreme comedy. Yet after those range-stretching efforts, he seems here to be going through the motions -- though they remain motions beyond the talent and dignity of most comic actors. Carrey is Charlie Baileygates, a Rhode Island state trooper who's seen in the film's prologue (there's an aw-shucks voiceover narrative from Rex Allen Jr., a letdown from the accompaniment sung by Jonathan Richmond in Mary) marrying his true love Layla (Traylor Howard) and retiring to his little house on the coast. A misunderstanding leads to a fracas with the limo driver, Shonté (Tony Cox), an African-American little person, and, unnoticed by Charlie, sparks fly between his assailant and his bride.

In due time Layla gives birth to triplets -- whom all but Charlie recognize as Shonté's -- and shortly thereafter, she leaves him for her diminutive lover, a Mensa member like herself. In a kind of inverse of the premise of Steve Martin's The Jerk, Charlie whole-heartedly and with not a little self-flagellation raises the three boys -- Jamaal (Anthony Anderson), Lee Harvey (Mongo Brownlee), and Shonté Jr. (Jerod Mixon) -- as his own.

Some 15 years and a hilarious jump cut later, we see that Charlie's nontraditional ménage has done little for his standing in the police force or the community. He's still a nice guy, which may be the problem: he lets everyone take advantage of him and treat him with contempt, with the bruises to his minute ego being soothed by the boisterous love of his huge, trash-talking, genius sons back home. One day someone cuts in line at the supermarket and Charlie snaps. He becomes Hank, his long-repressed alter ego, a lascivious, sadistic asshole -- the Cable Guy with fewer kinks -- who mutters the movie's better lines in a Clint Eastwood rasp while he avenges Charlie's grievances in a brief montage that is the movie's highlight.

The rest is slow going (the film clocks in at nearly two hours), as Charlie is medicated and so is the movie. Things pick up when Irene (Renée Zellweger) is brought into the station on a warrant from upper New York State and Charlie is enlisted to drive her back. Both he and Hank fall for her -- it's like Mary with Ben Stiller and Matt Dillon playing the same character. Instead of manic-depression, however, the movie opts for catatonia. Hank's psychotic aggression and Charlie's wheedling submission prove equally ineffectual and unfunny. And Zellweger is no radiant Diaz; her soft features arouse more paternal protectiveness than romantic ardor. She has her own something, however; her expression of injured dignity and non-comprehending satisfaction following a night with Hank and an 18-inch dildo suggests she might be harboring her own Ms. Hyde.

What's missing here is commitment: the Farrellys don't push Hank's transgressiveness or Charlie's humiliation to the limit, so instead of reconciling the two they merely dilute them. On the other hand, Charlie's three sons steal every scene they're in, even from Carrey, and in the process they flaunt some of Hollywood's more offensive racial stereotypes. Word is that the Farrellys are planning a spinoff sequel with the three. Let's hope some new material can sharpen the brothers' edge. Otherwise the jokes will start getting numb and number.