Me, Myself & Irene

Written by: the Farrelly’s and Mike Cerrone Starring: Jim Carrey, Renee Zellweger, Chris Cooper, Robert Forster, Richard Jenkins, Traylor Howard, Tony Cox

At first glance, the combination of Jim Carrey and the Farrelly brothers would seem to be a can’t-lose proposition. Like mixing vinegar and baking soda for model volcanoes in grade school, lots of fizzy fun and laughs would seem assured. Well, there is a lot of effluvia in their new film “Me, Myself, & Irene,” but not all of it is necessarily fun to watch, reminding us that sometimes, when you mix baking soda and vinegar, all you get is a big mess. Carrey plays Charlie Baileygates, a Rhode Island State trooper who seems to be too much of a simp to be a milkman, let alone a cop. When his wife runs off with a midget Black chauffeur (don’t ask), Charlie is so stricken that he develops a split personality. The obnoxious and virulent Hank becomes Mr. Hyde to Charlie’s Dr. Jekyll, and the hilarity is supposed to commence.

He gets mixed up with Irene (Zellweger), a comely young woman on the run from her thug of a boyfriend, who has been involved in some scheme that the filmmakers obviously felt was not important enough to explain. (No argument from me.) The boyfriend is afraid that Irene might blow the whistle on his apparently nefarious plot, so he plans to eliminate her. She and Charlie/Hank must team up to defeat the bad guys. Admittedly, in a movie of this sort, one would do well not to be too demanding of the plot and the characterizations. After all, the gags are the point, which serves to point out the limitations of the genre: if the gags aren’t that good, and you still have no plot or characterizations, you’re left without much of anything.

So you better make sure the gags are good. Peter and Bobby Farrelly would seem to be a sure bet in this regard. They have established their reputation as masters of comedy that treads the fine line (or, some would posit, falls over the line) between bad taste and funny. And Carrey is one of the most gifted physical comedians around. Yet while watching this movie, I kept being distracted by a number of small but annoying things. For example, I could not stop looking at Carrey’s haircut. He sports a buzz cut, as befits a state trooper, but it’s not very flattering, and it makes the back of his neck fold over in an unattractive way. He is also wearing extremely tight pants throughout much of the picture, which would seem to be the setup for some kind of a joke, except that no joke ever arrives. It makes you start to wonder just what Peter and Bobby are doing, and whether they have lost their touch. Along the same lines, for the last third of the picture, they make Carrey run around with a very conspicuous bandage on his chin, and while there is a joke attached at the end, it is minor, and certainly not worth the attention that we are forced to pay to the bandage.

I actually began to think that perhaps Carrey had injured himself during the course of filming, and that he was wearing the bandage because he had to. On top of everything else, the film is cursed with an intermittent voiceover narration by Rex Allen, Jr., who has a very distinctive--and distinctively cornpone--voice. It has the effect of distancing us from the action, so that we never feel invested in the characters on the screen. Truth be told, that may not be such a bad thing, because none of the characters are very appealing, and it’s pretty hard to generate much audience interest with that handicap. In the Farrellys’ previous outings, we could actually care about the protagonists, even if they were bumbling oafs. Those films had an underlying sweetness which redeemed some of the irredeemable comedy. “Me, Myself & Irene” has none of that; in fact, it’s rather mean spirited, holding up all of its characters to ridicule and insult. Hank (the evil half of Carrey) is certainly a distasteful psycho, but even Charlie (the good half) is a numbskull rube with whom you don’t want to spend any time either. Even Irene, while attractive, doesn’t exactly overwhelm us with warmth.

If we could develop any affection for these characters at all, the jokes about midgets, albinos, dog poop, and dead cows would play a bit better. I am not being politically correct here; my only requirement for a joke is that it be funny, and many of these are not; they are just puerile for puerility’s sake. One amusing conceit, which establishes Charlie’s gigantic African-American sons as science geniuses (though a real stickler would suggest that playing African-Americans as geniuses for laughs is itself inherently racist--what, a Black kid can’t be smart?) while Charlie banters with them in hard core urban hip-hop vernacular, is driven into the ground, and it doesn’t help that every third word out of the sons’ mouths is a four letter one starting with “f.” All of which simply serves to remind us that sometimes even talented people can get caught up in their own hype, and start to think that something is funny just because they say it is. The Farrelly’s struck gold with 1994’s “Dumb and Dumber,” a picture that pushed the limits of propriety in mainstream comedy, but which also possessed an innocence that balanced the truly juvenile humor. And the terrific “There's Something About Mary” was a study in how to make gross-out humor palatable, by involving us in the lives of characters we might actually like. There’s no such luck in “Me, Myself & Irene.” (7/17/2000)