Terrific double-act
Mark Steyn
Stuck On You 12A, selected cinemas
decade after the Farrelly brothers' irst feature, Dumb and Dumber, they've gone back to their roots. I'm speaking of coiffures: the twin protagonists of Stuck On You boast the same hair as Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in D&D, but their predicament is hairier — they're Siamese twins. Or, as Matt Damon points out, 'We're American twins.' But conjoined ones, at the hip.
The signature line of the Farrelly oeuvre was delivered in There's Something About Maly. when Matt Dillon, seeking to impress Cameron Diaz. tells her he really enjoys 'working with retards'. The Farrellys apparently spend much of their time working with retards: they're friends with many mentally and/or physically disabled persons, one of whom, Rocket, turns up here in a cameo more or less playing himself. And the subject of their next film — an able-bodied person who fakes his way into the Special Olympics — is confirmation that disability is to the Farrellys as the frontier is to John Ford.
Stuck On You is really a one-joke picture on which the Farrellys, writing and directing, ring just enough variations. They get the Siamese-twin sex thing out of the way early on. A curtain runs down the middle of the bed, on one side of which Walt (Greg Kinnear) is energetically enjoying himself with a gal he picked up in the bar while on the other Bo attempts to type a letter on his laptop while being rhythmically bounced up and down and slammed back into the headboard. As with everything on this subject going back to Todd Browning's classic Freaks, with the Hilton sisters, the main point of curiosity for the non-conjoined is what the sex is like. For Walt, it's great. He's the cocky, breezy half of the team. When Bo
stumbles in his pick-up lines, Walt swings him out of the way and takes over.
The early scenes on Martha's Vineyard show two guys who've made their lives a terrific double-act: they run the Quikee Burger, where they slice, grill, build and garnish their quarter-pounders in a rapidfire display of split-second choreography. They do everything together — pitch baseball, tend goal at hockey, and perform a one-man Truman Capote show at the local am. dram. Walt prowls the footlights in his white jacket doing a note-perfect Capote and fruitily shrugging off bons mots, while Bo hangs on round the back, sweating profusely through a bad case of stage fright.
Aside from Bo's annual torture as involuntary bystander to Walt's stage act, the twins have an all but perfect life. No one thinks it's odd seeing a two-man version of a one-man show, and, when a passing tourist in their diner sneers at them as 'freaks', the entire clientele rises as one in support of the pair. The Farrellys. easygoing openness to freaks is most unHollrfvood — think of Oscar-bait like My Left Foot — and closer to the way it used to be in the days when the village idiot was a routine feature of village life. In the Farrellys' movies, their variously afflicted characters inhabit a generally benign universe in which the real freaks are those who condescend to them. When Walt decides he's had enough of smalltown community theatre and wants to give Hollywood a shot because 'I think I've got the chops', no one — least of all his brother — says. 'Are you out of your mind? You're gonna be going to auditions with your very own non-speaking extra stapled on the side.' Even in LA, when they hang out poolside in their swimming shorts, their pneumatic airhead of a neighbour (Eva Mendes) assumes the bridge of flesh between them is just some cool new procedure: 'So where'd you get that done?'
This is the film's big variation: after the easy sight gags, a couple of guys who've learned to accept themselves as they are are plonked in a world where you're expected to be whatever the studio or network wants you to be. But in Farrelly films the protagonists are generally sunny nails who prosper at the expense of the conniving. So in Hollywood the pair blunder into Cher, playing herself and being very sport ing about it. Anxious to get out of a TV contract for a crummy detective show, she demands the Siamese twin as her co-star. But the network calls her bluff and, despite awkward moments when Bo's nose hoves into shot, Walt's TV career takes off.
Meryl Streep playing Meryl Streep is less successful, and the finale is a big disappointment, for an obvious reason: the film issues her a challenge and she ducks it. But by this stage it doesn't really matter: the Farrellys have finally pulled off the trick they've been straining for this last decade — using potentially gross-out material to make a mainstream romantic comedy. You can measure the scale of the accomplishment by the way they manage to make Gilbert O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again, Naturally' genuinely affecting for perhaps the first and last time in history.
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