Big props to the brothers for using Junior Brown's "Highway Patrol," one of my favorite songs, in the opening credits, as well as for finally using lawn darts for their intended purpose: to kill people. But the boys literally made me jump out of my seat in outrage when they dissed Duke. Oh yeah, like you guys are so fucking smart. Ring, ring, it's the clue phone, and it's for you: files about Vincent Foster's death would not be on the Pentagon's server. Ooops, there's call waiting: EPA employees ARE NOT ARMED. No, seriously -- they have a shoot-out involving EPA "agents." Not to mention that one of the "agents" is far hotter than any environmentalist I've ever seen. If EPA staff really looked like that, I would ditch the non-profit sector for good.
As Hank/Charlie, the Me and Myself of the title, Jim Carrey actually seems sort of restrained. Much of his physical comedy comes from small twitches in his facial muscles as he flips from one personality to the other. Charlie wants desperately to be liked and lets everyone from his wife to bratty kids on the street wipe their feet on him. Hank is pure id; he embodies all of Charlie's pent-up rage and libido. I guess I was expecting a little more depth after The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, but a Farrelly Brothers movie is not the place to look for subtle characterization. Still, I wish Carrey had been nominated for an Oscar for one of those movies just so that I could compare some of the things he does in this movie with the only other Oscar-nominated actor to come close to something so disgusting: Jon Voight.
Renee Zellweger, as the titular Irene, is pretty much a non-entity. She was so wonderful in The Whole Wide World, but she's never come close to that level since. Chris Cooper, a real actor, is unbearably bland as one of the interchangeable bad guys in the lethargic subplot that involves the heat-packin' EPA agents. The supporting players who show promise don't get nearly enough screen time. Charlie's sons are especially funny; they're essentially the same joke repeated over and over... but it's funny every single time. And I always like seeing Robert Forster, though I'm hard pressed to say why. (Speaking of '70s cop show veterans, in our hotel in Williamsburg, one channel on the TV showed continuously a movie called The Story of a Patriot, starring Jack Lord as a Colonial Williamsburghian. I didn't know they had Aqua Net in the 1700s.)
It's late, and I'm tired and have to be up early for work tomorrow, but I feel that, given my frequent outrage over insulting portrayals of women, Native Americans, environmentalists, government agents, and other oppressed brethren, I should make some comment on the protest over the movie's depiction of mental illness (Solidarnosc!). It made me feel pretty uncomfortable at times, particularly when Carrey is fighting himself and switching back and forth from Charlie to Hank -- it's such an inaccurate and simplistic portrayal of multiple personality disorder that it's offensive. I couldn't help but feel that the movie was making light of a very serious problem that most people really don't know enough about to understand how ridiculous it is. That sentence is a little unclear: what I mean is, I didn't mind, for example, the way Charlie and his sons use "bitch" as a synonym for "woman," because it's so plainly a joke. But I don't know that most of the audience will realize the inaccuracies in the depiction of Charlie's disorder. The movie disturbingly gives the impression that mental illness can be cured through willpower and a hot babe rather than medication. (I'd like to test this theory, but I don't think my doctor would write a prescription for Russell Crowe.) Anyway, this didn't bother me as much as the jokes about retarded people and so forth in Mary; it didn't affect my enjoyment of the movie in a serious way. But I think it's worth mentioning.
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