June 22–29, 2000

movies

Dual in the Sun

A tight fit: Jim Carrey fights for breath; Anthony Anderson, Jerod Mixon and Mongo Brownlee do the compressing.

by Cindy Fuchs

Me, Myself & Irene

Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly
A 20th Century Fox release
Opens Friday at area theaters

"I’m not through with you, buster!" Glaring at himself in the mirror, Rhode Island state trooper Charlie Baileygates (Jim Carrey) is at his wit’s end — literally. Charlie’s enraged that his malicious alter ego, Hank, has spent a passionate and rapaciously kinky night with his sweetheart — by posing as Charlie. Undone by the news, Charlie starts to act a little like Hank: He grimaces, fulminates, sputters, and, finally frustrated beyond words, just up and spits on that damn mirror.

This is probably Charlie and Hank’s mildest confrontation in Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s latest gross-out comedy, Me, Myself & Irene. But if other scenes are wilder and funnier — I’m thinking particularly of the one where Hank and Charlie battle for control of a red Mustang convertible, punching and throwing each other out of the car as it rolls on down the road — this one names the stakes: possession of the girl whose name lends the title its third term, Irene (Renée Zellweger). She inspires both personalities to ire and desire, even as they’re supposedly protecting her from her former mobster boyfriend/employer, the significantly named Dickie (Daniel Greene). Whether they’re eluding the bad cops on Dickie’s payroll (played with purposeful ickiness by Chris Cooper and Richard Jenkins), or competing for Irene’s affection (or at least her sexual compliance), Charlie and Hank are really contending over who’s the better man.

This isn’t a new theme for the Farrelly brothers: All their movies are about unresolvable masculine anxieties, and you can easily make the case that all Jim Carrey’s movies are, too. From Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin to There’s Something About Mary, from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to The Mask to Man on the Moon, both the Farrellys’ and Carrey’s work is resolutely focused on performances and apprehensions of masculine aggression, audacity and self-awareness. In this latest collaboration, they push their routine buttons — sexuality, class and race — and, as usual, end up celebrating exactly their parodic object, the straight-white-middle-class masculine ideal, impossible, ridiculous and endlessly amusing.

Charlie begins the film as a wimpy nice guy whose beautiful circa-’70s bride Layla (Traylor Howard) cheats on him with their wedding-day limo driver Shonte (Tony Cox). When she abandons Charlie and her black triplet sons, he dutifully raises them as his own, so easygoing that he adapts their apparently genetic speech patterns and appreciation for Richard Pryor and Chris Rock: On seeing the latter’s "tossed salad man" routine on HBO, Charlie — squeezed onto the couch between his now linebacker-sized 18-year-olds — guffaws and proclaims him a "funny motherfucker!"

Charlie’s close and mutually supportive relationship with his sons signals that he is indeed a good man. But the fact that the boys — Shonte Jr. (Jerod Mixon), Jamaal (Anthony Anderson) and Lee Harvey (Mongo Brownlee) — are also larger and leagues smarter than Charlie, not to mention blacker, leads to some nasty local gossip concerning his manhood. Charlie snaps, splitting into the contemptible and flamboyantly aggressive Hank, which means that Carrey is again playing the unself-conscious and self-abusive double character he plays so well and so often: The Mask, The Cable Guy and Liar, Liar being only the most explicit incarnations.

Here, the splits multiply exponentially, as within each persona, Carrey acts out a particular psychic rupture. The mild-mannered Charlie’s self-difference is mostly verbal: Decked out neatly in his trooper’s uniform (britches, gloves, and helmet), Charlie looks almost embarrassed when speaking the street profanity and black slang he’s picked up from his lovable kids. With a goofy smirk, he warns the boys to do their homework, or else, "I’d hate to have to bust a cap." And as he leaves on assignment, he reminds them of the house rules: "No bitches after 11."

Such basic fish-out-of-water comedy is almost redundant for Carrey, whose standard shtick is to appear simultaneously in and out of synch with his own body. But where Charlie’s self-contrast plays out racially, Hank’s is more obviously a matter of gender/sex confusions, translated as brutal physical humor. As Hank, Carrey cuts loose in the way that his fans expect and adore. The camera zooms in on his face, and Hank’s brow clouds over and his eyes narrow; suddenly he’s all swagger and meanness, itching for a fight, or, while escorting Irene from Rhode Island back to her hometown in upstate New York, for fornication.

Their road trip takes up the bulk of the plot, as various wacky encounters turn into outrageous, outsized Farrelly-style jokes: intentionally offensive bits about dick size, body fluids and orifices. Hank’s inability to turn down anything that even resembles a dare ensures that he’ll be beaten up repeatedly, bloodied and bruised, wondering what went wrong. For all his braggadocio, Hank is a profoundly incompetent he-man. Hank also slavers irrepressibly after Irene (eyeing her beguilingly, he asks, "Do you swallow?"), though she’s inclined to fancy the more pleasant, if rather dimwitted, Charlie.

Still, there’s something about Hank. He’s probably sincere when he tells Irene that he appreciates her natural beauty ("Your squinty eyes and your face all pursed up like you just sucked a lemon"), but he definitely has his own identity "issues," exposed when she reports that during their wild night together, it’s he, and not she, who was responsible for sticking a big floppy dildo up his ass.

Rife with such incendiary instances of what might be called "male hysteria," Me, Myself & Irene can’t really straighten them all out. The film isn’t so much racist or sexist or homophobic as it is generally opprobrious, and in the end, the good man isn’t so much intact and triumphant as he is crazily redefined and reshaped by his wackiest encounter, the one with his own bad self. That the distinctions between good and bad, aggressive and meek, masculine and not, are blurred in the process, makes the film look almost insightful or intelligent. But rest assured, it achieves its primary objective. It is emphatically dumb.