ME, MYSELF & IRENE (2000) / ***
Directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly. Screenplay by Mike Cerrone, Farrelly and Farrelly. Starring Jim Carrey, Renee Zellweger, Chris Cooper. Running time: 116 minutes. Rated AA for coarse language by the MFCB. Reviewed on June 28th, 2000.
By SHANNON PATRICK SULLIVAN
In a way, I have a lot in common with Charlie Baileygates. I consider myself, all things considered, a nice guy. I'm polite. I do favors without expectation of reward. I could count on one hand the number of times in the past five years that I've gotten really, blood-boiling, vein-in-the-neck-throbbing angry. Sometimes, I'm probably a bit of a pushover. I've often wondered what would happen if, one day, I just... snapped. The new comedy "Me, Myself & Irene" is devilishly entertaining wish fulfillment.
Charlie, played by Jim Carrey, is a Rhode Island state trooper. The film opens with a flashback to eighteen years ago, when Charlie married his sweetheart Layla (Traylor Howard). On their wedding day, Charlie became involved in an inadvertent fracas with Shonte (Tony Cox), a black midget limo driver who, like Layla, was a card-carrying Mensa member. Soon, Layla and Shonte were having an affair, and nine months later she gave birth to triplets: three African-American baby boys. Outwardly oblivious, Charlie raised the kids as his own (despite the fact that one is actually named Shonte Jr!).
Fast forward to the present. Charlie is rearing the boys by himself, Layla having run off with Shonte years earlier. His "sons" (Anthony Anderson, Mongo Brownlee, and Jerod Mixon) have grown into brilliant but foul-mouthed prodigies -- witness their hilarious, profanity-laden quantum mechanics study session. But gullible Charlie has become the state joke, and one day all his pent-up rage externalises itself... as a split personality, Hank, a gruff-talking, aggressive, no-nonsense jerk.
There's more to the plot than this, of course, as Charlie/Hank becomes involved with Irene (Renee Zellweger), who is being hunted by corrupt New Jersey cops because of her involvement with a crooked golf course owner. Or something. Frankly, the specifics of this whole storyline are made murkily clear at best, and really don't matter anyway. The point is just to keep Charlie/Hank and Irene together for an extended period of time, and embroil them in a series of wacky encounters.
"Me, Myself & Irene" is a funny movie, but it is in many ways a victim of its own publicity campaign. So much of the set-up has been revealed in trailers and in print that a lot of the humor which could have arisen from the unexpected and improbable scenario has been defused by our familiarity with the material. Imagine, for instance, directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly's last picture, "There's Something About Mary", if you knew Chris Elliott was Woogie. Few comedies can sustain the laughs no matter how well-acquainted we are with them ("The Philadelphia Story" does it for me; so does "Mystery Science Theater 3000"). "Me, Myself & Irene" is no exception.
There's also something of a miscalculation in the script by the Farrellys and Mike Cerrone. Hank starts off as an amusing character -- consider his revenge against a woman who skips ahead of Charlie in the supermarket line-up, for example -- but then the writers seem to assume that Hank as a concept is good enough. However, Hank himself isn't funny; he's grotesque, really. To work, Hank needs to be doing funny things, but for much of the middle third of the film, he doesn't, and this contributes to long stretches of comparative tedium. There are also some really bizarre moments, like the late introduction of another companion for Charlie and Irene, the weird albino Whitey (Michael Bowman), whose inclusion seems almost an afterthought. Or the inexplicable cameo appearance by tennis star Anna Kournikova, which seems to exist just so we can realise, "Hey, that's Anna Kournikova!"
Fortunately, things pick up heading into the home stretch, especially once Charlie and Hank start to coexist simultaneously. It is these scenes in particular that really give Carrey a chance to shine, and he makes exhaustive use of his rubber-faced, marionette-limbed repertoire. Carrey also does a good job playing Charlie and Hank as truly different yet fundamentally interconnected, and it's a shame his material wasn't more consistent. His interaction with the boys, for instance, is priceless, as he slips effortlessly into urban slang: "That be whack!"
Zellweger is also enjoyable, and gives Irene enough strength to hold up against the human onslaught that is Carrey. But Irene is a poor successor to Cameron Diaz's character in "Mary", because whereas Diaz was both the instigator and victim of comic moments, Zellweger is usually just left to react to Carrey's antics.
There has been some controversy surrounding "Me, Myself & Irene", and the erroneous association of the term "schizophrenic" with Charlie's split personalities. Although the term "schizo" is used on occasion in the film, it is never employed by someone who should know better -- instead they spit out "advanced delusionary schizophrenia with narcissistic rage" like it rolled right off the tongue. The purported "controversy" is a non-starter.
Indeed, I was surprised to find that the subject of multiple personalities is not just used as ammunition for jokes, but instead earns some serious consideration as well. There is a theme running throughout "Me, Myself & Irene" that many people assume fabricated identities, be it for profit, or escape, or just to cover up a mistake. This is true not just of Charlie, but also Irene, Whitey, the corrupt cops, even Shonte the limo driver. "Me, Myself & Irene" being the kind of movie that it is, the idea is not pursued to any great lengths, but I appreciated its inclusion nonetheless.
I had great hopes for this reteaming of Jim Carrey and the Farrelly brothers (they first worked together on "Dumb And Dumber"), and in the final analysis I'll admit to feeling a little disappointed. "Me, Myself & Irene" is not the best comedy for either, trying but failing to be as funny and outlandish as superior entries in their respective filmographies. But it is very entertaining all the same -- and if it doesn't appeal to the Charlie in you, maybe there's a little bit of Hank lurking inside that will enjoy it instead.
Copyright © 2000 Shannon Patrick Sullivan. Archived at The Popcorn Gallery, http://www.physics.mun.ca/~sps/movies/MeMyselfAndIrene.html
_______________________________________________________________________ / Shannon Patrick Sullivan | "We are all in the gutter, but some of us \ | shannon@mun.ca | are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde | \___________________________|__________________________________________/ | Popcorn Gallery Movie Reviews www.physics.mun.ca/~sps/movies.html | | Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time (Travel) /drwho.html |
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews