They're Not Hollywood, 
They're American
On the Farrelly Brothers and Stuck on You

By Gabe Klinger

There’s a gag line in Stuck on You that Matt Damon’s Bob Tenor figures has some ethical bearing in Hollywood. Conjoined to his wanna-be actor brother Walt (Greg Kinnear), the two are being interviewed by their small-minded but appropriately crazy agent, Morty O’Reilly (played by Seymour Cassel), who cautions them that Siamese twins aren’t the easiest sell in the movie business. “We’re not Siamese,” Bob retorts, “we’re American.” The intuitive Hollywood geniuses Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who penned, produced and directed Stuck On You, are less about product and glitz than they are about creating challenging films using the least likely subject matters. So in a way, as their own logic goes, they’re not directors-for-hire suckling on whatever Hollywood has to offer; they’re American filmmakers entering into the fabric of our collective filmic sense.

Dumb and Dumber (1994) earned the Farrellys creative freedom virtually overnight, though their vision was such that it was well-suited for the Hollywood career they would come to inhabit. A typical Farrelly picture pairs a couple of well-meaning losers in a premise usually involving a road trip (was there ever a more inexhaustible premise for comedy?), typecast bad guys who occasionally inflect hurdles onto the heroes, the harboring of a distant love-affair, and triumph through ingenuity and incredible circumstances. The Farrellys are crowd-pleasers in both senses: their stories deliver exactly where the audience expects (hence it’s not their forte –  but who cares?), and their films are also sweet-natured and truthful about American (and Hollywood) attitudes towards beauty and social acceptance. It is in Shallow Hal (2001) and their latest, Stuck on You, that this concept has become especially apparent.

Isn’t a common ploy that Hollywood filmmaking – like advertising – inadvertently tells audiences they are ugly by force-feeding us with physically impeccable actors with suave personalities and impossibly simple methods of dealing with love and anguish? If one goes all the way with the notion of esthetic contrarianism (going as far back as neorealism), it becomes painfully clear that the Farrellys have never air-brushed “ugliness”. In Shallow Hal they managed to pull the rug from under our feet by dressing Gwyneth Paltrow in a 300-pound body suit and alternately showing the character of Rosemary Shanahan’s true physicality and her “ghost” image as the Gwyneth we know. Maybe “high-concept”, but also entirely reliant on the visual as a metaphor for a troublesome issue that is deeply ingrained in Hollywood culture. The potency of this image is used for full-effect at the film’s conclusion, when Jack Black’s Hal Larson embraces Rosemary and gregariously tries to lift her massive frame into his car (he doesn’t succeed), is in turn carried by Rosemary and both drive happily into the horizon. A predictably satisfying conclusion that is rendered irrelevant by the brave message that’s at hand: even Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty can be manipulated, differed, and cause people to look into themselves rather than at exteriors. Besides, what other Hollywood films have portrayed such name stars through such grotesquely uncommon metamorphoses?

It is precisely in the visual that the Farrelly brothers exploit their comedic sense but also find their hidden meaning: the poised look on Hal’s face as he continues to flatter Rosemary for her “skinny” figure; Paltrow’s magnificent turn at emulating a fat woman sans body-suit; Hal’s friend Mauricio’s discombobulated presence as he starts to reveal his own defects. Even when earnestness starts to take command, the Farrellys shoot Hal’s reactions in the same way as the clownish Hal who’s trying to court beautiful women at the beginning of the film. In a scene at the Pediatric Burn Ward where Rosemary nurses disfigured children, Hal is confronted with a little girl whose scars were invisible to him. But before the camera reveals the girl to us, Hal’s expression dominates the frame as he tries to come to acceptance with his visual malignancy. The shots that come afterwards – a clever framing of a sign reading “Burn Ward” that lowers onto the little girl and her disfigurement, and Hal’s counter-shot as he pulls the girl towards him – are more of requisite storytelling devices than meaningful dramatic cues.

In Stuck on You there is an even finer line between humor and pathos, and often both things are layered in the image of Bob and Walt, conjoined twins, restaurant entrepreneurs, gifted athletes, and in Walt’s case, actor of fringe theatre who aspires for Hollywood. The Farrellys are often criticized for their inarticulate framing and shoddy continuity, but here they find a solution by having to frame Bob and Walt in a single shot, relying on Damon and Kinnear to carry the weight of each scene rather than for the camera and editing to thrust the narrative along. And yet there is another creative problem for having both actors conjoined: Bob and Walt’s interests don’t always meet, so often the other is tagging-along, acting idly and trying to appear discretely. When Walt takes to the stage to perform as Truman Capote in a play entitled “Tru”, Bob dresses in all-black and hides behind Walt’s shoulder. But our eyes are not on Walt; they are fixed on Bob’s sweat beads as he nervously plods around. He has stage freight, and the complexity of their conjoinedness begins to set itself off in the brothers’ personalities. In the second act, I began to find myself deeply moved by even the most minute details: Bob napping next to Walt on a sunny California beach as the other is engaged in a conversation with sprightly lingerie model April (Eva Mendes); or Walt calmly waiting for his brother’s panic-attack to subside on their motel room floor. The film never lacks focus in either brother and goes a long way to establish expressive nuance underneath Bob and Walt’s admittedly gag-worthy predicament.

Similarly, every word of dialogue spoken by Damon and Kinnear has a palpable reality, as if one brother is crying for acknowledgment from the other as they bounce back and forth between their differences. In There’s Something About Mary (1998), Matt Dillon tries to pass himself off as a successful architect to impress Mary (Cameron Diaz), but his increasingly ridiculous fabrications (his structure across the street from the Estadio Olimpico in Santiago) do not have the same emotional authenticity as Bob’s efforts to conceal his conjoinedness from his girlfriend May (Wen Yann Shih). “I see what you mean about your brother Walt,” says May on their first date. Bob counters, “Yeah, he’s a bit clingy.” And yet when May discovers Bob and Walt in bed in what would appear to be evidence of a gay love affair, we can’t help but think that, beyond Bob’s embarrassment at the insinuation, there is still the poignancy of two 32-year old brothers who are forced to sleep together as if they were still toddlers being tucked away by their parents. At one point Walt alludes to Bob masturbating (“last night was like sleeping next to a paint-mixer”), and Bob accuses Walt of invading his privacy – as if such a thing were possible with conjoined twins. There is more unspoken than spoken in Stuck on You, which part of the joy in being able to isolate these seemingly inconsequential moments.

As with Hal’s de-hypnotization in Shallow Hal, the twins in Stuck on You eventually go under the knife and are allowed to spread their wings once and for all. But before the Farrellys lock-in on the moral quandary of separation (offset by Cher’s baseless P.C. rhetoric in telling a television producer that it would be wrong to hide Walt from his God-given other half), Bob is vehemently opposed to the surgery with the well-meaning Walt driving his point home by flouting on Bob’s sobriety and landing the two in jail after a D.U.I. incident. Walt is visibly demoralized – howling halfheartedly as he reaches for whiskey shots – and Bob, growing claustrophobic of his brother’s self-effacement, agrees to the surgery when he realizes his relationship with May is in paralysis without it. In an earlier scene, Walt forcibly pushes Bob towards a single woman in a bar with the intention to awaken his brother’s stilted love-life. He does not realize Bob is not over May, and a gradual zoom onto Walt’s face from a two-shot of the brothers lying in bed is the first symbol of their separation, accustoming the audience to the notion of individual space. The night before surgery, Bob and Walt are playing CGI-hacky-sack and reveling in togetherness as their most daunting days lie ahead– as generous as a gesture from the Farrellys as any.

The film’s double-edged humor returns with an even bigger punch in the third-act; Bob, in his first waking hours as a two-legged creature, announces to an unsuspecting passer-by, “Hey, I’m alone!” Unaware of the connotation, the man looks awkwardly at Bob (provoking one of the biggest laughs in the movie) and replies, “Yeah buddy, and you’re staying that way.” And when he crosses the street to reunite with May, body swooped over to one side and arms and legs threatening to trip over each other, his face begs her to look at him with child-like fascination. May, leading Bob into her apartment before the scene suggestively fades to black, is giddy for their first intimate moments. The Farrellys have returned Hollywood to the noblest forms of subversion, springing to mind the finest films by Howard Hawks (John Wayne’s hotel encounter with Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo), and in the direction of a sophistication that’s worlds apart from Woody Harrelson’s post-coital episode with his landlady in Kingpin (1996). Ultimately if one accepts that the Farrellys are not mutually tied to gross-out anymore, Stuck on You is prepared transcend its own gags; Bob and Walt are stuck together again at the end (this time via velcro) and Walt, returning to the stage to perform in “Bonnie and Clyde: The Musical”, points to his brother from the stage after singing, cathartically, Billy Stewart’s “Summertime”. Bob intently returns the gesture in the film’s first 180 degree shot-countershot of the twins. Bob and Walt Tenor face each other as the imperceptibility of brotherly longing dawns on their most victorious moment.